The American choreographer Meg Stuart, who was been working in Belgium since 1994, received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Former illustrious winners include Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, William Forsythe and Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker. On Thursday evening, she will also present her new production, titled Celestial Sorrow, in the Kaaitheater in Brussels.

A work that aptly demonstrated why she merited this award as, in the jury’s words, the choreographer has continuously sought to redefine herself in her work, developing a new language and a new method for each creation.

Her most recent work was created for Europalia Indonesia. She was introduced to the Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto, who created an installation for Grand-Hornu. Together, they worked in Yogyakarta around a common theme: how can the past and its ghosts be expressed by bodies, music and light?

The Indonesian artist focused on the painful memory of the long Suharto dictatorship, which was overturned by the student movement in 1998, and the horrifying massacre of millions of communists in 1965–66.

The result is compelling and very impressive. The spectators are seated along the walls. More than 1,000 light bulbs hang from the ceiling, forming a starry sky, which at times casts a harsh light on the stage. The Japanese DJ Mieko Suzuki stands behind her turntable on stage, playing obsessive lounge-style music.

Three dancers, singers and performers create overwhelming and at times even bizarre ambiences. The choreography opens with a long, shamanistic meditation, with cries, various sounds, a golden cloak, followed by a mad, rave-like trance, like a rite of spring on ecstasy. Sorrow, the candour of the images of our youth, mysterious Indonesian figures and the heightened kitsch of a saccharine-sweet song from Java all follow.

The sounds formed by plenty of different noises and breathing, the costumes by Jean-Paul Lespagnard (including a cloak with fairy lights) and the lighting design are especially well done.

What you see on stage is all inspired by the situation in Indonesia. The light that flickers on the trucks, the clashing noises. These are all ways of reminding you that the dark Suharto years are really behind us. And the sorrow of the sad songs refers to the fact that this music was banned under the dictatorship.

While the choreography is dark and experimental at times, the audience is swept away on several occasions, by the extraordinary talent of the performers and the vocal acrobatics from Berlin (Jule Flierl and Claire Vivianne Sobottke).

Meg Stuart once again demonstrates her talent for taking risks and exploring new territories.

The independent American choreographer Meg Stuart (2018 Golden Lion of the Biennale di Venezia / Dance) and Indonesian visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto joined forces to create a work, titled Celestial Sorrow, making up their own rules as they went along. In it they celebrate the beauty of turmoil and of contradictions which meet but never mix, like two immiscible liquids.

Spectators should probably rely on their experience to interpret Celestial Sorrow, a collaboration between Meg Stuart and Jompet Kuswidananto. But to do this, you need a basic principle: you need to trust the singularity of your emotions and their value rather than ignore them. To be convinced of this principle, all the spectator must do is look at the opening scene-sequence: it is dizzying, causing the spectator to feel vertigo, a trance in a ‘happening’, that is ritualistic rather than ritualised. Because here dance is part and parcel of an infinite present, because heterogeneities exist, because the body breaks free as a result of a transformation, because the dancer (Jule Flierl, Gaëtan Rusquet or Claire Vivianne Sobottke) mainly seems to be danced, haunted as he or she is, when moving under ‘the celestial vault’ (the installation that Jompet Kuswidananto created), which is beautiful and fear-inspiring in equal measure.

Often a guttural sound or a gesture pops up where it is least expected, like memories, feelings or traumas that surge to the surface. Celestial Sorrow’s incomprehensible beauty solidly steers us away from mere narration. Our gaze is always captured by something else. Hence the unresolved turmoil the spectator experiences, when confronted with an individual who wants to express everything at the same time, or that evaporates to make way for a multitude of almost imperceptible small movements

The turmoil in itself is not fascinating but the pleasure that it provokes, linked to excessive emotions, even to a contradiction. Meg Stuart’s intelligence is apparent in the association of this pleasure with music (Mieko Suzuki, Ikbal Simamora Lubys), with dreamy light (Jan Maertens), with a sudden dissimulation or exposure of part of the body thanks to the costumes (Jean-Paul Lespagnard). So why do some images make more of an impression on us than others? Those in which the eroticised bodies seem glued to each other only to break away. Those in which the performer, arms raised as if connected with the whole of the universe, undulates in a trance. Whether you like it or not, there is something beautiful about this darkness. The mystery will remain unresolved, until blindness sets in perhaps.

Something inexorably breaks free, rising out above the meeting of these contradictions. Oddly enough it is both one and the other: Meg Stuart and Jompet Kuswidananto, Indonesia and the West, darkness and light, consciousness and the unconscious, nature and art, humanity and the universe. ‘A medium told us that Celestial Sorrow reminded him of oil and water’, says Gaëtan Rusquet. ‘And that it was a good thing that the various elements remained separate, that they were never mixed’. In Celestial Sorrow, the choreography is inspired by an endless quest. It shocks because of the combination of profound and scandalous deterritorialisation, with a heightened transcendence of identities (with queer nuances) and a community in celebration, that has created a scary form of experimentation, which, however, is never dissociated from the specific realities. The history of Indonesia is suddenly referenced, in a song called Hanti yang luka by Betharia Sonata, in the detail of a minor almost operatic form (the parade of a miniature truck). ‘In Indonesia the dictatorship banned the song Hanti yang luka because it was deemed too sad’, Gaëtan Rusquet explains. ‘It refers to the violence against women. Under the dictatorship there was no place for sadness or pain. By performing it as part of Celestial Sorrow, we have given this song a place to exist, to be free.’ Here the lyrics of Hanti yang luka break down the last resistance, dragging everyone along in its scintillating wake, in the purest of light, as if drawn in by a very naïve desire for an exalted ideal.

In Celestial Sorrow magnetism appears in its most poetic form: in the last scene, a few furtive gestures by a peacock-man makes us forget everything that happened, marking a return to order, before the confusion begins again perhaps. When the lights of Celestial Sorrow are switched on again, in all their harshness, all you can say is: this is exactly what I wanted to see on stage, a work like no other. Celestial Sorrow by Meg Stuart and Jompet Kuswidananto is all about the aura of a gesture that connects man with the universe, and finally with himself, in a multitude of ways.

Allyson Green: As I write I am in Hammerfest, Norway, improvising in a festival with Latvian, Norwegian and Russian dancers. The skies completely darken here by 1:30 pm. So I am in a strange Nordic dreamlike state as I travel back in memory to 1989 when Meg Stuart and I were both working in the Randy Warshaw Dance Company. Dancers learn much about each other by moving together; an intimate conversation built of trust and shared experiences that form our homes on the road and in the studio. Our bodies become containers of memories that have settled into our bones. I close my eyes and I can still see Meg darting forward in the opening movement phrase of Randy’s “Fragile Anchor.” Meg’s dancing was (is) at once fierce and tender, determined and vulnerable. In fact “fragile” and “anchor” are apt words to describe her performance. My memories take me inside Randy’s studio on Wooster Street. I can still feel the reverberations of a quartet created with Meg, Jennifer Lacey, Susan Blankensop and me; exacting hours of recalled improvisation to acquire minutes of set material. I treasure a gift photo of a duet with José Navas, with Meg watching from behind; it keeps us three dancing in a fleeting moment captured in black and white. We were all weaving our lives together in and out of downtown studios, and trying to make ends meet. Fellow striving artists were creating magic in the lofts of Soho, long before it transformed into a high-end shopping mall. We formed our chosen family during a time that became marked by the AIDS epidemic. Too many loved ones left us far too soon. The grief gave us a determination to keep creating, to keep moving, to keep working for long hours into the night. Nothing would stop those of us left behind. Meg would soon catapult from fellow NYC dancer to a renowned European creator.

André Lepecki: In 1991 American choreographer Meg Stuart premiered her first evening-length piece at the Belgium dance Festival Klapstuk. Titled Disfigure Study, it was a quiet, dark, somber and deeply moving hour-long trio that immediately created a stark contrast to the highly theatrical and hyper physical dance that informed most of the European dance scene at the time. Indeed, Disfigure Study truly disfigured expectations of what a New York based dancer trained in the traditions of release technique and contact improvisation was supposed to present to an European audience in 1991. The piece was minimalist without being formal or abstract; profoundly affective without being theatrical or expressive; deeply technical without relying on one identifiable technique; highly visual, and yet, mostly taking place in shadows, penumbra, and darkness. Where one would expect integral bodies and fluid movement, Stuart offered a stark sense of post-AIDS melancholia, turning dancing bodies into incoherent (and yet very consistent) collections of partial body parts. Whereas the piece was directly inspired by Francis Bacon’s art, Disfigure Study did not explicitly refer to any of his paintings. Rather, it tapped into Bacon’s main aesthetic principle, what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called Bacon’s “logic of sensation.” Disfigure Study’s disfiguration of series of cliché images of avant-garde dance at the end of the 1980s was a refiguration of what it meant to desire movement in the wake of so much death.

AG: I remember our excitement for Meg when she was given the commission to create Disfigure Study. It was remarkable in those days to get such support to spend time in the studio, and then to present in Europe, hurrah! Watching the last rehearsals, I knew she had created something special; a new and distinctive voice that spoke to how we were all recovering, adapting and moving on. She had discovered the seeds for what would blossom over the next years. I remember trying to encourage her to trust when her work was ready to be seen, but she had so many doubts at the start. The pressure was great. I recall watching as André quietly offered insightful collaborative dramaturgy that grounded and amplified Meg’s visual, physical and conceptual explorations. Meg was building a new chosen family and “Damaged Goods” seemed exactly the right words to name her fledgling company (taken from the last line of a review by Burt Supree). A few years later she would teach me one of her solos, to add into an evening work of mine entitled “Recuerdo: Passing Back through the Heart.” There was a specificity of form in her direction that was precise, emotional, and intimate. Rooted on the spot, the repetition of percussive movement, “oh yeah huh,” right shoulder jutting forward, still reverberates in my core.

AL: Since then, Meg Stuart’s work has metamorphosed into all sorts of directions: large improvisational events gathering visual artists, composers, philosophers, dancers (Crash Landing [1996-9], or Auf den Tisch! [2004-11], to mention two examples); intimate interactive installations (for instance, Intimate Strangers [2008-11]); large group pieces (VIOLET [2011], or the extraordinary Built to Last [2012]); publications (Stuart’s Are we here yet?, [2010]); video installations (Study of a Portrait [2016]); and series of solo works performed by Stuart herself (most recently, Hunter [2014]) – these are just a very small fraction of all the titles comprising Stuart’s impressive and multifaceted body of work. In each of these manifestations of Stuart’s unique artistic impetus, we can find the poetic force of sensation at work. We can sense the logic of corporeal affects being made to operate by this indefatigable choreographer/dancer/performer in singular and powerful ways in order to deliver to her audience not only new images, but new imaginations: of the flesh, of modes of existing, of ways of moving, of entangling, of touching, of choreographing. Affects-as-imaginations exuding from the trembling body, or erupting through the animal quality of a very human howl, are what allow Stuart to consistently and logically move her dance and dancers across the most disparate disciplines, spaces, bodies, in delirious images and through lysergic sounds. Stuart’s works are events aimed at attacking (sometimes rather unceremoniously), and at redressing (sometimes quite touchingly), her audience’s affective field.

AG: From then our journeys led us into different directions that would cross from time to time. We would see each other in Europe, in New York, in class, in performance, in improvisations, and I loved to see her explorations in both big productions and in intimate settings. Each of us would grow into roles as creators, teachers, leaders, curators, and writers, and still we are always asking questions and pushing through doubts. I was always frustrated that I never got to see enough of Meg’s company in New York. I have continued to find her work to be profoundly moving, with haunting visual, sonic and physical images that linger in memory long after viewing. Her book Are we here yet? has become a bible of choreographic methods loved by multidisciplinary artists in many countries.

AL: Choreographically, Stuart approaches the dancer’s body (including her own) as an impermanent collection of independent, autonomous, distorted entities, as if each limb, each body part, was moved by a desire of its own. Compositionally, her pieces gain consistency by the ways Stuart meticulously saturates the scenic space with highly affective forces that she draws from her dancers-collaborators. Dramaturgically, every scene links to the next by relentlessly affirming the constitutive ambiguity inherent to every single situation in our lives. Thus the haunting effects in Stuart’s works. They are unparalleled in contemporary choreography, simultaneously requiring from the audience a capacity to attend to the most poetic micro-details as well as to endure the most violent spasms in a dancer’s moves. If there is any violence, it is always under the project of highlighting a deeply touching understanding of the ultimate fragility of living.

AG: I am grateful that we have improvised our way back to crossing again in New York, to the NYU Skirball Theater just blocks from that studio on Wooster Street. My path led me to become the dean of the Tisch School of the Arts where as a student Meg first began to choreograph so many years ago. And André offers his eloquent words once again, now in his role as distinguished author, curator and Chair of Performance Studies at Tisch. Who would have imagined that in those early days? I wait in anticipation to see Meg’s work. Passing back through the heart, our next memories will refigure my bones.

Co-written by Allyson Green and André Lepecki in travel between November 6th and 9th, 2017 in NYC, Hammerfest, Norway and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Published in the context of Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods their performance of UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP at NYU Skirball New York.

Allyson Green is the Dean of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. André Lepecki, Ph.D., is the Chair of Tisch’s Department of Performance Studies.

When a disgruntled spectator walked out of the theater forty-five minutes into Saturday night’s performance, he took the time before exiting to announce to the room “how embarrassing and disgusting” the work was. The two performers onstage instantly stopped their activity (a playful, inquisitive exploration of each other’s nude bodies) and sprang into defensive crouches, darting glances towards the voice at the back of the house, like startled animals ready to fight. Waves of warm laughter swept through the audience, not only in appreciation of the performers’ quick response, but because their reaction, slyly exaggerated as it was, was shared by many of us. Until that moment, embarrassment and disgust had been refreshingly absent from the space. To conjure these states by speaking the words aloud was not just an ill-timed critique; it felt like an affront, an attempted reimposition of conditions and contexts the performance had worked carefully (and joyfully) to transcend. In a program note, choreographer Meg Stuart discusses the idea of borders, both physical and social. “Our social relationships are built on protocol, fear even,” she writes. “We have a lot of limitations.” Evidently so.

In UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP, Stuart, an American whose work is rarely seen in the U.S., pushes her performers past those limitations. An opening sequence drawing on Stuart’s experience with contact improvisation quickly progresses into even more intimate territory—well beyond the everyday boundaries that keep us at a safe social distance—as the performers map the contours and crevices of one another’s bodies with hands, fingers, mouths, and noses. These explorations are often tinged with the erotic, but explicitly sexual gratification is not on offer; the intention and context are absent. The performers simply accept pleasure when it arrives as a natural consequence of any of their varied modes of touch, as they also accept pain, awkwardness, and discomfort—all of which are entirely different from embarrassment. Doris Dziersk’s purple-carpeted set, part swanky cabaret and part rec room, creates a space that is almost but not quite familiar, a territory with no known rules that allows anything to unfold within its bounds.

Though Skirball’s proscenium initially separates us, this territory expands to include the spectators, as the performers draw us into their restless interpersonal experimentation. In lieu of an intermission, the performers make their way into the house, asking questions (“Does anyone have rage?”), offering up objects for tactile encounters (I ended up with a lump of clay, clay which shortly prior had encased the head of the performer who handed it out), and calling out several special guests in the audience. Later, our nostrils are filled with the smoke and sweet scent of incense, and a volunteer is brought up onstage to participate in a classic disappearing act, complete with mirrored compartment. These and other references to magic and mysticism again approach the question of boundaries: between reality and illusion, inside and outside, between what we thought possible and what we see happening in front of us.

Near the end of the two-and-a-half-hour piece, the house lights go up and the company faces the audience as performer Claire Vivianne Sobottke presents us with a series of proposals. Is there anyone in the house, she asks, who has the time to walk her to her hotel after the performance? Come up to her room and eat chips? Is there anyone who wants to take the company out clubbing til morning? As she elaborates various scenarios, listing all the things “we” would do together, alternative outcomes begin to take shape in our imaginations, directions the evening could take that we hadn’t conceived of. No one volunteers, however, and Sobottke’s proposals grow ever more manic, as a driving rhythm (courtesy of a trio of onstage musicians who occasionally double as dancers) gradually fills the space. “Can somebody put a spell on us so we don’t feel anything anymore?” she finally calls out. In this cry I hear not a craving for emotional anesthesia, but a wild desire to exist beyond, to inhabit a state outside of our ordinary modes of living and feeling. In staging this desire, Stuart enlists her collaborators and her audience in casting her own spell. A spell for the banishment of embarrassment and disgust; a spell for new forms of relation, calling forth possibilities for connection, support, and release.

Meg Stuart recently received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in the dance category at the Venice Biennale. The award is well deserved as she has been influencing contemporary dance since the 1990s with her visually powerful, physically captivating and sensually electrifying work. Although internationally successful, she has put down strong local roots. Her company Damaged Goods has been based in Brussels since 1994, while Meg Stuart herself lives in Berlin. With a performance combining design, dance, the visual arts, fashion and music, she is appearing at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer again in March. The artistic collaboration on “Sketches/Notebook” in 2013 has been resumed. Having been created during a residency at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer, it can now be seen for one last time in Berlin after guest performances elsewhere. In the “Supernova” support format, Meg Stuart and the artists involved light up and then burn out – so to speak – the material they have since accumulated. At the premiere of “Sketches/Notebook” five years ago, the journalist Astrid Kaminski wrote a portrait article on Meg Stuart. In the same way as the performance, we pick up where we left off with a new version of her article. It was originally published in the art magazine Frieze d/e (Issue 9, Apr - May 2013). Astrid Kaminski has updated it for tanzraumberlin, adding elements from a later portrait essay for Theater der Zeita (issue 6/2015).

A small, cumbersome figure wrapped in a heavy robe of layered quilts, her mouth stuck in a grimace, each foot shackled to a sack of bricks as if about to be drowned. A picture that hurts, even if there is no story to accompany it – not even a scream. Arranged into this static-looking image, the dancer and choreographer Meg Stuart drags herself across the floor in her collective performance “Sketches/Notebook” (2013). At the other end of the room, costume designer Claudia Hill, who dressed Stuart beforehand, strips her back down to her thin, naked skin.

Designers and live musicians are often seen on stage in Stuart’s productions. The entire first part of “Sketches” belongs to Hill. Again and again, she readies the dancers for a brief photo shoot before tidily hanging all the props back on the clothes racks. This act provides an insight into the rehearsal process, but also involves a bit of child-like dressing up as well as an unusual kind of catwalk flair – voguing. There is nevertheless also a hint of futility. There is no need for a dress. In “Blessed” (premiered in 2007 at the Berliner Volksbühne) it was Jean-Paul Lespagnard who dressed the dancer Francisco Camacho - soaked, like the cardboard palm tree and swan props, by the artificial cloudburst on stage – in a beach towel and a death mask. The scene may be paradise or a typhoid-infested quagmire, but at least the issue of style has been taken care of. It is not a question of dress code, but rather a counterpart or partner reading the mood.

Explosion of energy

Asked whether her tendency to turn the stage into a dressing room points to a hidden Marie Antoinette complex, Stuart answers: “So not!” Instead, she explains her need for designers by saying that “individualities are incomplete”. The artist herself is without make-up, in a brown vintage pullover, her bleached blonde hair tousled. Moving her hand over her head from behind, as she often does on stage, is probably her favourite gesture in private too. She has displayed the courage to appear dishevelled during her career too. The period after her Volksbühne residency under Frank Castorf were restless but extremely productive years. Her company Damaged Goods, which she founded in 1994, is still located in Brussels, her apartment is in Berlin, she did a project-specific residency under Johan Simons at the Münchner Kammerspielen, while she has also collaborated closely with the HAU Hebbel am Ufer since Annemie Vanackere took up her position as artistic director. After strong ties with the Schauspielhaus Zürich (2000 – 2004) and the Volksbühne (2005 – 2010), these are artistically intense but loose associations with theatres involving extensive touring.

She has created various performances, such as “VIOLET” (PACT Zollverein, Essen, 2011)â¯– a dance mania – “Built to Last” (Münchner Kammerspiele, 2012) - an exploration of the fall of classical and pop etc. – and “Sketches/Notebook” (HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 2013) - a choreographic self-disclosure in collective form. It is as though something has exploded over the course of these performances. They were followed by the magical piece “UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP” (Münchner Kammerspiele, 2015), which not even those who fervently detest the esoteric could resist, and “Projecting [Space[” (2017) for the Ruhr Triennial and “Celestial Sorrow” (Kaaitheater Brussels, 2018) in collaboration with the installation artist Jompet Kuswidananto. It did not come as a surprise when at the start of the year it was announced that Meg Stuart would be awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Dance Biennale in the summer.

Meg Stuartâ¯maintains vibrant yet committed relationships – few European choreographers of contemporary dance can match her record. Residencies at theatres where dance is not part of the usual programme are rarely available, except to her. To hear the choreographer, who is now in her 50s and celebrated her last big birthday with the biographical cut-up piece “Hunter” (HAU Hebbel am Ufer, 2014), tell the story, it sounds as if her own career came about more by chance than design. She is very good at understatement but part of this is genuine shyness: “Some people think I’m shy. If you get to know meâ¯â¯– the same.”

Polyvalent, auratic construct

The “Sketches”, which are now being resumed at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer, were always conceived as a collection of ideas and as a kind of harvest rather than a completed, smoothly choreographed oeuvre. Each of the performers, musicians and (lighting) designers closely associated with Meg Stuart – Brendan Dougherty, Claudia Hill, Jorge De Hoyos, Mikko Hynninen, Vladimir Miller, Antonija Livingstone, Leyla Postalcioglu, Maria F. Scaroni and Julian Weber - contributes something from their own profession. While not intended, this ultimately produces a deeply auratic construct through which the team moves as if it were Ariadne’s Thread. Much is reminiscent of what is already familiar but, as Antonija Livingstone put it, it is polyvalent. As so often in Stuart’s productions, the lighting by Mikko Hynninen seems to be filtered through celluloid. There is a hint of a pale reflection as if the party is always already over, even when, as in “Visitors Only” (Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2003), it is still in full swing – or is somehow different depending on various layers of reality between longing and remembering and reality and fiction. There is an impulse over which an afterglow already hangs, but also a fear of pointlessness and futility.

The quilted lady mentioned before also made a previous appearance, featuring under the working title of “Blanket Lady” in the performance-exhibition “Moments” (2012) at the Karlsruher ZKM. This figure with the aura of a sad down-and-out queen, like something straight out of a Samuel Beckett play, conveys the basic mood of Stuart’s existentiality. Her company is called Damaged Goods and it does not take much imagination to extend the application of damaged goods to the body. This vehicle, which makes so much possible, on one hand, but rules out so much on the other, is loaded with both energy and pain at the same time. It is not so much Munch-like pain with a gaping mouth as a hollowed-out final form of existence but rather that of an overstretched body that is not warm which was the basis for “Disfigure Study”, Meg Stuart’s breakthrough performance in 1991. In a figurative sense, there is the pain of a self that constantly has to act and react but hardly ever has adequate means with which to do so.

“There is never exact harmony between what is going on in our minds and what is happening with our bodies,” explained Stuart in “Are we here yet?” (published in 2010/14), a book on the poetics of her work published by the author and the dramatist Jeroen Peeters. This sentence leads her to the problem of an impossible presence. She sees thought, memory and imagination as overlapping activities, entwined with one another but which take place at different levels and in various ways and each with its own logic, generating a kind of endogenous noise. Her method is to crank up the noise and then to channel it with mental and somatic techniques.

Bodies as shells and sensory apparatuses

Meg Stuart’s performers are neither themselves nor do they embody particular figures. They do not appear in the tension of the post-dramatic pose between “mask” and “person”. They are already the product of a subject forming multiple possible realities that divide back into themselves. Although there are pieces like “Maybe Forever” (Kaaitheater, Brussels, 2007) and “BLESSED” that hint at psychological figures or deal with specific relationship issues, the bodies of Stuart’s performers are more shells and sensory apparatuses than characters. They are somatically explored, psychologically corrupted bodies that shiver, articulate ticks, pull faces, get in a whirl and become entangled. Not tied to any particular soul, they are traumatic dream dancers imprisoned in a vegetative fabric of interconnected movements.

The “empty body” is an important artistic tool for Meg Stuart, as are her studies of trance-like states, providing a base from which the body can become a container and a laboratory of mixed emotions. That is also what gives her works their often contemplative, even meditative quality, in spite of the aggressive music and abrupt scene changes. But this does not mean relaxation in the conventional sense but more of a David-Lynch-like “Mulholland Drive” feeling, a perpetual nervousness that lasts and lasts until it has formed a level of its own, becoming absolute.

Stuart’s oeuvre as a whole is also a kind of container, open to influences from almost every field of the arts. The fact that she comes from a theatrical family definitely also plays a role as do the handovers from one parent to another over the famous Californian Highway 101 in her childhood. During her time in New York in the 1980s and early 1990s, she lived in SoHo, visiting several galleries a day. With hindsight, she says her sense of choreographic space was very much shaped by her studies of pictorial composition. This led to many collaborations with visual artists and filmmakers, including Gary Hill, Ann Hamilton and Pierre Coulibeuf.

Compaction to the point of eruption

In her book on Stuart, Bild in Bewegung und Choreographie (Image in Motion and Choreography, 2008), art theorist Annamira Jochim, who has spent years analysing the artist’s works, inverts this relationship, looking for aspects of an expanded definition of the performativity of pictures. Material for this approach is provided above all by the different viewing angles in spatially fragmented choreographies like Highway 101 (2000) and Visitors Only. The “Sketches” aesthetic with its partial audience mobility – during the performance a whole row of seats is periodically placed on a ramp bringing Simone Fortis’ “Dance Constructions” to mind – does not need to underline its experimental character. There is an air of nonchalance as though the audience and performers agree that they know the rules of the game but do not have to explore them.

This attitude of wanting to give something at best but not always wishing to offer it also means the audience sometimes has to bear with it. There is no compulsion. If something does not spark, it continues to smoulder. The audience must put up with this and there is not much to elevate here either. Meg Stuart is not known for letting conceptual statements limit her scope of action. Surrendering to the process is the true constant across all the variation in her works. The sense of letting things happen is perhaps not expressed as well anywhere as in “UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP” and in “Sketches/Notebook”. Sometimes like a volcanic process, where the depth of collaboration produces an eruption, and sometimes like a game marvelling at the material assembled. It is perhaps this scope for freedom that makes Meg Stuart’s performers, who usually also have their own solo careers, so munificent. Like the marbles that roll over the boards in “Sketches”, they have no particular goal, they follow their orbit and shimmer. This self-energy is not starting capital but rather the result of precise artistic work on these rather fragile and damaged goods in which we pass through life.

She dances with such phenomenal control of the body that even the most complex combinations of movement seem as self-evident as normal communicative behaviour. The words leave his mouth as if the most outlandish chains of thought belong to everyday language. He succeeds in speaking without a mic in the most unaffected tone of everyday conversation yet can be clearly understood in the whole theatre.

Understatement and mastery are combined in the performance “Shown and Told” by and featuring Meg Stuart and Tim Etchells. Both artists appeared as if they were only briefly passing by and had to go straight back to work in a tavern serving beer and bar food. They wear jeans and trainers – him in a light-blue t-shirt and her in a loose yellow, brown and black chequered top – all bargain brands.

Shaking things up and great power of persuasion

They hardly need to blow their own trumpets – neither 51-year-old Stuart – who enduringly shook up the contemporary dance scene of the time at just 27 years of age to the extent that it was no longer as it was before – nor 56-year-old Etchells, who developed such a convincingly fresh type of performance in the 1990s with his Sheffield-based group Forced Entertainment that British theatre suddenly thrilled the whole of Europe. Over the years, they have succeeded in developing a lightness, verve and persuasive force which goes far beyond most of what currently passes through contemporary choreography companies.

Voices like the wind

In “Shown and Told” both appear in the spotlight at the same time. Stuart immediately starts to dance, while Etchells keeps his distance, watches her, reads her movements and starts to speak: “It is like the sound of voices from another room, like a noise coming from the room above when you can’t really hear the voices and they sound more like the wind blowing through an alley.” The audience is transported into another world where associations and images are triggered by dance.

Complex feelings

This distribution of roles – him the wordsmith and her the master of body language – is not maintained. Stuart also engages in language: “I dance to ask questions and because I have too much energy, so that I can practice dying and can make love to the floor all day long...” In this vein, situations, sketches and scenes are played out, complex feelings are invoked and imaginary cities conjured up. There is ironic grandeur throughout where mockery and anger about the outside world are sometimes combined.

“Are you there?”

Artistic loops constantly ramp up the tension and absurd interjections provide amusement. At one point he looks at her and asks: “Are you there?” In astonishment, she replies: “Is that a serious or a philosophical question?” He says: “More of a political one.” Yes, exactly, there is also a political dimension to this performance not presented as a militant vendor’s tray. The audience in the sold-out TQW Hall G was enraptured and not without good reason.

It’s like… He talks a bit and she dances a bit: ‘Shown And Told’ (Meg Stuart & Tim Etchells)

Hans-Maarten Post, Utopia Parkway, 28.01.17

“I dance because I wanted to be a magician but I’m not good with stuff”, Meg Stuart tells the audience, somewhere along Show And Told, her collaboration with Tim Etchells. If the piece proves one thing, it’s how good the American choreographer and the British (performance) artist actually are with stuff. Be it other stuff. Movement stuff. Language stuff.

It’s like… Well. He talks a bit and she dances a bit. Then she talks, and he… tries to move a bit. Summarized in two sentences, Shown And Told would look a bit like… this. It is the kind of piece in which nothing spectacular happens, but what happens can be spectacular, if you’re willing to look and listen.

Meg Stuart and Tim Etchells. A combination that undoubtedly will arouse the interest of many festival programmers. A well-known choreographer (Damaged Goods) and a respected performance artist (Forced Entertainment) collaborating. But Shown And Told isn’t a piece for the big stages. It feels more like a low-key workshop. A “structured improvisation” is what they call it.

They have been working together on a number of occasions in the past. Etchells contributed text to a couple of Meg’s pieces (for instance: Alibi, in 2001). They met again, working on Expo Zéro, an improvisation project by Boris Charmatz in Berlin in 2014 and decided to do this piece together.

What they share is “an interest in fragments, in parts of a movement, gesture or state”, Stuart and Etchells told the audience at a post performance talk at Kaaitheater (Brussels; December 2016). “What it is to work with them as pieces. Assemble them, disassemble them. And it is interesting to see somebody do the same in another language.” Etchells: “For instance, I’m interested in things such as stream of consciousness, in reinventing and morphing language. Bringing that to Meg opens it in a different way.”

Or as he phrased it, in an interview in the Kaaitheater programme: “The biggest and simplest connection is our common idea of a human being as a kind of meeting point for many different voices, impulses or presences. Many forces, narratives and possibilities move through us in any give moment.” What he and Meg do not have, Etchells said during the talk, is a “shared methodology”. And thus: doing this performance together “is a bit off territory, and that’s the attraction of working together.”

It’s clear that it is appealing for them to do this together. But they are clever enough to come up with a performance that isn’t too self-centered or hermetic. It’s actually quite interesting and sometimes funny to see them play with movement and language. What they come up with on stage might be simple, light and straightforward, but by the way they present all of this to an audience, you just feel that these two bodies and minds carry a couple of decades of experience. Just don’t expect spectacular things to happen.

In recent years, visual artist Jozef Wouters has risen to prominence with ingenious site-specific installations, performances, seating tribunes and sets for artists such as Meg Stuart and Claire Croizé. In INFINI1-15 he steps out of the public space and into the large ‘box’ of the theatre. And rather than storming and conquering the surroundings, as you might expect from a young artist, Wouters negotiates the existing infrastructure with great intelligence. Inspired by the spectacles des machines of the eighteenth-century scenographer Giovanni Servandoni, he invited fourteen writers, theatre producers, choreographers and architects to create an infini: an interpretation of the painted backdrops that were once raised and lowered to lend depth to each new scene. Wouters reinvigorates this historic technique.

The shape of INFINI 1-15 cannot be seen: a performance with just sets, one might imagine. Crafted in Wouters’ Decoratelier, these pieces of scenery are both impressive and enchanting, even when at their most minimal. They fully succeed in turning the theatre into an imagination machine. For over four hours, and from the one seat, you journey through time and space: from dead-end Palestinian tunnels and the office of the European border guard agency, Frontex, to a pitch-black room. The theatre as a black cube, from which everything and nothing might arise.

INFINI 1-15 lends porosity to the boundaries between craftsmanship, art and scenography. Drawing on his vast knowledge and respect for theatre history, Wouters considers the future of the institute. In so doing, he incidentally proves that younger creators are unafraid of big auditoriums, as is often claimed. Furthermore, he is dismissive of the big messages presupposed by large auditoriums and reclaims the theatre as a studio, with space for experimentation. This thoughtful reflection on the theatre itself was greatly appreciated by the jury.

INFINI 1-15 not only researches which (utopian) landscapes we ought to depict in today’s theatre, but also the very act of looking. How can we rethink the central perspective of the classical theatre into an era in which nobody appears to be looking through the same glasses? Wouters shares his space with a wide range of up-and-coming international artists. It typifies the cooperative spirit of a generation of theatre-makers who don’t privilege their own ego and elevate the spirit of collaboration into their new credo. Instead of one perspective, you gain a kaleidoscopic view of the world. The outlook is nothing less than infinite... A performance as an unparalleled gesture.

“Theatre is a great place to dream,” says Meg Stuart in the solo Hunter (2014), to then continue her tongue in cheek monologue: “Imagine this place would not always be a theatre.” Just before that she spoke of online creativity as a blueprint for other realities, of the rigid character of architecture and urban spaces that have only one function, of people crossing in the subway or the supermarket but not really meeting one another. “Imagine this theatre would be a place where once a month you give blood. Or where people gather to collectively burn all their Ikea furniture in a ritual statement. Different actions, you know.” I remember spectators responding strongly to this proposal to imagine the theatre otherwise and discussing their own ideas in the foyer after the show. Perhaps that was the first spark – a collective dream spilling out of the theatre and slowly dispersing itself, carried by all the people present.

How do we envision theatres and other art spaces today and tomorrow? How do we shape these places of encounter, these laboratories for living together? During the past years these questions have been recurring in our conversations – with choreographer Meg Stuart and scenographer Jozef Wouters, and with many others collaborating on Projecting [Space[. During one month the company Damaged Goods will work on location in the Zentralwerkstatt Lohberg in Dinslaken, transforming it into a temporary environment for imagining and experimenting with collective practices of meeting and making – and for sharing these activities with others.

Browsing through my notebook I’m struck by the many references to heat recorded during rehearsals. We did spend some time in cold industrial buildings, but then the transformation of energy also became a research topic in its own right, with a variety of resources gathered to feed the smoldering bonfire that is a rehearsal process. Always interested in the beauty of precarious structures, it’s Jozef Wouters who conjured up this image: “For me a bonfire is about building something that you plan to burn – it doesn’t need to be sturdy or last for years. Setting something ablaze means to consume it, to expend it. There is an aspect of hedonism in that. And as the fire burns the construction grows invisble and smaller, and then the circle of people around it becomes smaller too, until everyone sits down and eats marshmallows together.”

In rehearsal we discussed the impact of energy sources on cultural production, but quickly moved away from wood and coal to what drives bodies dancing, sensing, witnessing. “What about the energies of healing practices? Or the heat of a large group of bodies at a rave party? How can we catalyze the energy of the audience? Is sensitivity an energy source? And fiction?”

Imagine a group of highly sensitive bodies entering a former mining factory. What if these bodies would softly brush up against a concrete floor? Would they become site-specific? Material and spatial conditions would be partners in the conversation, an encounter of heterogeneous surfaces and desires – human bodies, machines, wood, stone and cloth, remote urban clamour or a beam of light. Perhaps it would manifest in abstract lines or in slow, unison dances. Or maybe in stirring attention for the smallest particles when someone blows a handful of dust across the room. What would these meetings tell us about transformation of energy, or about relations of care?

At the end of March, the Molenbeek workshop of scenographer-artist Jozef Wouters played host to Atelier III. During that happening, Meg Stuart, Jeroen Peeters and Wouters tested what a ‘future’ theatre of the imagination might look like. Projecting [Space[, the hallucinatory apotheosis of that quest, was subsequently shown at the Ruhrtriennale.

Dinslaken: a grey city that is filled with countless visible traces of the long-departed steel and mining industries. Johan Simons played Accattone there two years ago, in a huge hall that is now half demolished. In this stony wasteland, Stuart, Peeters and Wouters, together with eight performers and two musicians, set up camp in and around the ruined brick warehouses.

Their performance begins outside, on the paved surface surrounding the building. A couple transform their car into a kind of carnival wagon. Another pair, wearing swimsuits, ride in circles on mountain bikes that are far too small. Poised in the background are two men with a forklift truck and an earth-mover. Others hang on to the machine, or crawl into the digger’s bucket. Sounds assail you from every direction, ranging from dub reggae and soundscapes to simple songs. Passers-by watch the strange, indefinable spectacle from a distance.

A TV-screen full of trinkets

The occupants of the car then lead the audience into the cavernous machine hall where the impressive scale of the building finally becomes visible. Viewed only from the outside up until that point, it had been consumed by the vast surrounding emptiness. The hall is crammed with equipment, most noticeably an abundance of robust, towering racks. In the first half of the building, there is barely a metre between them. Further on, they are used to create a semi-circular seating tribune. At the entrance, sounds emanate from a tractor tyre that spins aimlessly round on chains. In another spot, there is an embellished TV screen, filled with trinkets. And so it goes on, seemingly without end. It transcends immediate comprehension. The wet dream of children who’ve carried home everything little thing that has captured their imagination.

Between those racks, the performers, complemented by Meg Stuart herself, seek contact with the people via gestures and touches. Many participate in this opening rite. Only afterwards do the performers develop their own rituals. For what other word can be used to describe the strange gestures they make, and which invariably hover between tics, secret signs and a group dance? A ‘collective celebration of personal obsessions or fantasy dreams’? Maybe. Many of the subsequent scenes seem to share mutual relationships, but these frequently overlap and are also supplemented by the voices of the performers, who talk about their experiences. It is impossible to follow everything at once. It is overwhelming.

Naked between the viewers

The only certainty is that the performers not only dream, but that their dreams become ever more indulgent. For example, Jorge De Hoyos, running as fast as he can, tries to take-off with a parachute. Mor Demer, who is naked, suddenly darts between the viewers. Sonja Pregrad, Roberto Martinez and Márcio Kerber do things with pigments, coffee and paint. Sigal Zouk and Renan Martins, who dance almost continuously, provide the piece with a baseline. And Mariana Tengner is, to all extents and purposes, the master of ceremonies. Meanwhile, the double bass and electronic sounds of Klaus Janek and Vincent Malstaf reverberate throughout the proceedings.

What this means, if anything at all, is not the point (any longer). Projecting [Space[is a quest for what might happen when people come together for one reason, and one reason only: the experience itself. Whether you join in or not, that’s your decision. But no one in Dinslaken could resist the enchantment of the giant campfire at the end. This temporary construction, destined only to consume itself, was the perfect symbol for this work: an intense experience that disappears with the visitors who gave it form.

“Theatre is a great place to dream,” says Meg Stuart in the solo “Hunter” (2014), to then continue her tongue in cheek monologue: “Imagine this place would not always be a theatre.” Just before that she spoke of online creativity as a blueprint for other realities, of the rigid character of architecture and urban spaces that have only one function, of people crossing in the subway or the supermarket but not really meeting one another. “Imagine this theatre would be a place where once a month you give blood. Or where people gather to collectively burn all their Ikea furniture in a ritual statement. Different actions, you know.” I remember spectators responding strongly to this proposal to imagine the theatre otherwise and discussing their own ideas in the foyer after the show. Perhaps that was the first spark – a collective dream spilling out of the theatre and slowly dispersing itself, carried by all the people present.How do we envision theatres and other art spaces today and tomorrow? How do we shape these places of encounter, these laboratories for living together? During the past years these ques-tions have been recurring in our conversations – with choreographer Meg Stuart and scenographer Jozef Wouters, and with many others collaborating on “Projecting [Space[”. During the month of August 2017 the dance company Damaged Goods works on loca-tion in the Zentralwerkstatt Lohberg in Dinslaken, transforming it into a temporary environment for imagining and experimenting with collective practices of meeting and making.These notes are inspired by the research and rehearsals towards “Projecting [Space[”, yet they were written before our arrival in Dinslaken – except for occasional location visits. They’re not quite a user’s guide, rather notes on issues that occupy us, notes that are in limbo. They address various transformations of energy, ecstatic encounters and care for the unfamiliar – all of it through a gamut of materials that were gathered to feed the smouldering bonfire that is a rehearsal process.Always interested in the beauty of precarious structures, it’s Jozef Wouters who conjured up this image: “For me a bonfire is about building something that you plan to burn – it doesn’t need to be sturdy or last for years. Setting something ablaze means to consume it, to expend it. There is an aspect of hedonism in that. And as the fire burns the construction grows invisible and smaller, and then the circle of people around it becomes smaller too, until everyone sits down and eats marshmallows together.”

One wall of the studio is covered with images collected by all the collaborators. An arrangement of blue and red-brown images shows a body lying flat on an asphalt road, next to a huge land-scape grazed bare by bulldozers; and below that an underground parking lot that leads to a fantastic grotto with a shimmering light at the end. More worlds can be imagined underneath, perhaps reaching 1.2 kilometres deep – like the shafts and corridors left in Dinslaken-Lohberg by the mining industry. Once the coal excavated and burned in the Ruhr area spurred on a whole industry and culture of workers and production, while society and cultural patterns are now defined by different energy sources as fossil fuels are quickly running out.If particular energy sources have a profound impact on the cul-tural production of a certain era, then what will the future look like? In “Art and Energy”, Barry Lord explores how cultural values are linked to energy sources that became available to us throughout the ages – from sexual and kinetic energy, to fire and cooperation, to nuclear power. In the studio, we picked up his speculations around renewable energy and a “culture of stewardship” that devo-tes more attention to our bodies and to the Earth. Our discussion quickly moved away from wood and coal to what drives bodies dancing, sensing, witnessing. “What about the energies of healing practices? Or the heat of a large group of bodies at a rave party? How can we catalyze the energy of the audience? Is sensitivity an energy source? And fiction?”

After having seen a documentary on gem stones and crystals, Márcio Kerber Canabarro, one of the dancers, told us they are born under a lot of pressure. What would it be like to harvest a crystal? Imagine the almost endless amount of time and pressure required to arrive at such a precise shape and substance. Or imagine the yet unborn fossils, minerals and crystals that carry traces of our time into a distant future. “They’re future ancient beings, a conscious-ness that will last long after we are all gone, when all organic forms will be depleted.”

Pushed to the side of the studio wall, there are some photos of dis-used industrial buildings, abandoned amusement parks and shopping malls, or derelict world fair pavilions and Olympic sports stadiums. Modern ruins devoid of human presence. What do the glossy photos of these imploded dreams tell us? The so -called ‘ruin porn’ imagery of former car factories and all manner of modern cathedrals in Detroit is mostly geared towards sensation and consumption. Economic crisis and the social dramas it entails, are drained from these images, which don’t invite a critical view. Do we perhaps need different images to practice alternative ways of looking at what produced these ruins?The many disused coal and steel factories in the Ruhr area are in a sense giant rehearsal spaces. Some are in actuality converted into environments used for very different purposes, including the per-forming arts. They’re all attempts to give these buildings new func-tions and destinations, and, for the people who used to work there, to imagine their lives differently. Art comes in as a guardian of experiment and imagination, in a community’s probing of alternative ways to approach labour, food, education, gathering, ritual, etc. And not to forget: leisure, rest, protest, even laziness – also ‘not-doing’ are ways of doing that require attention.Along with the interest in industrial archaeology, the reconversion of these factory buildings also provides training spaces in another sense. In the future, there will be new and other disused buil-dings awaiting new purposes. Imagine all those abandoned airports in the not-so-distant-future beyond peak oil – what will we do with them? Turn them into museums of modernity? Or will they, now hubs for impersonal and swift mobility, in the post-labour society become spots for lingering? Gym spaces for people to keep their atrophied bodies in shape when drones and robots do all the work? Environments for gathering, encounter and ritual? Imagine all the behaviours and lifestyles that could be practiced in such a space.

Also theatre buildings fall to ruin, even though the time of decay eludes the attention and imagination of us, theatre visitors. And yet, long before the forest takes over the debris of a derelict theatre, the elements are already fully alive in there. “How to be present to an event that does not address us? How can we attend to events and phenomena that lay beyond the senses?” In search of answers, the artist Augusto Corrieri follows a mosquito circling around the head of an actor and gets distracted from the play. Or he wonders how we can look at a theatre also as an actual stone building. Suddenly, the background shifts to the foreground, non-human agents and different temporalities come into play. In an essay, he concludes: “Courtesy of ecological catastrophe and anthropogenic climate change, an irrevocable shift in perspective has suddenly im-posed itself: the outside has burst inside the auditorium; or rather, we are only now realizing that the outside has always been inside.”In another reversal of sorts, in a rehearsal Meg Stuart asked the dancers to read the landscape while the landscape is reading them at the same time. “Your body is highly sensitive, your limbs are like antennas. You’re tracing lines of connection – to the things in front of you, but also to the energy around, to presences that are not visible.” Imagine such an encounter in which the space is reading you whilst you are watching. Or imagine your highly sensitive body brushing up against the concrete floor of a former mining factory. Would your body become site-specific? Would material and spatial conditions become partners in the conversation, in this encounter of heterogeneous surfaces and desires? Imagine your attention to the smallest particles being stirred when someone blows a handful of dust across the room.

To the right, the photos climb higher up the studio wall. They follow the dynamics of the people in the images constructing spaces with wooden frames, organising things or drawing abstract lines in the air – gestures that defy gravity and entropy.About a year ago, we found ourselves in a former cement factory, where Jozef Wouters guided a rehearsal around the vocabulary of building. In a delimited space full of stuff – stone, metal, wood – he asked everyone to elevate things. “Pick up something and decide whether it is waste or whether it has a higher energy potential. You can order things, put them upright, stack them, or throw them out if needed. Go about it in a practical manner. It’s like cleaning versus building.” After an hour or so, the space was full of compositions, both miniatures and large arrangements. The next task was to sit somewhere – to look at the environment from within, to inhabit it, perhaps to transform it yet again. How does your body fit in this space?The memory of these improvisations lingers on whilst reading a wonderful essay by Robert Pogue Harrison on the gardens of homeless people in New York City. These transitory gardens are not exactly a green oasis, nor made for growing vegetables; rather, they’re compositions made in open spaces with stuff at hand – arrangements of stones and wood, trinkets, leaves and branches, or perhaps a stuffed animal that “conjures up the spirit of plant and animal life.” Some last only for a day. According to Harrison, gardens didn’t come into being for reasons of survival. “There is an equally fundamental craving in human beings to transfigure reality, to adorn it with costume and illusion, and thereby to respiritualize our experience of it.”Gardens give order to our relation to nature, an embodied sense of human order. For the homeless, their compositions create not so much shelter but a pocket of repose and give “human dimensions to an otherwise unbounded urban expanse.” They introduce form in the inarticulate urban jungle and mark off an area in which speech, social intercourse and care become possible. How does your body fit in this space?

The images on the wall are rearranged every day. They’re pulled into an improvisation or ritually destroyed, to then rise again in a different order, taking on the form of a dragon or a tree of life. Together they also enable us to create scenarios and dream about the work in the making, or to explore how people would behave in certain environments. Travelling along and through those photographs, we could identify with the many nomadic figures in them and their extreme journeys. Vagabonds, squatters and walkaways, a delivery man with cardboard packages stacked high on his motorcycle, circus artists, refugees in a rubber boat, an astronaut with a parachute, a woman disguised as a building, another man carrying a boulder across the desert – a dancer asks, “are you sure it’s not the stone carrying the man?”Imagine some of these figures form a nomadic tribe that would travel from the future to today’s time to share their lore – the stories, songs and dances that reflect their ways of living together, of practicing labour, care and ritual. Would we be able to understand their reports about the future state of things? Would we look at today’s world with different eyes? Would we be spurred on to sen-sitize ourselves and experiment with spaces and situations of encounter? Would we be able to push our imagination of the present to the edge of the familiar, approach other worlds and begin to experience and care for the foreign in our midst?

“What do you want to be called?” That’s how walkaways greet one another in Cory Doctorow’s sci -fi novel “Walkaway”, as an explicit invitation to remake yourself – and to enter into conversation as much as into practice. These walkaways are not walking out on society nor living off the grid, but they’re practicing to free them-selves of what they call ‘default reality’. “What’s the systemic outcome of being a walkaway?” – “I don’t think anyone knows yet. It’s going to be fun finding out.”

In Tom McCarthy’s novel “Satin Island”, two anthropologists visit the storage space of the anthropology museum in Frankfurt, which holds thousands of objects of the Sepik people in New Guinea. Detached from the undocumented practices of the Sepik, these objects are now only touched with white gloves and remain in limbo. “What do you think, for example, she asked, opening another cabinet and pulling out a strange wicker contraption, this thing is for? A fishing net; ceremonial head-gear; a bat for playing some kind of game; a cooking implement… Who knows? We don’t. We won’t. We haven’t even catalogued half this stuff. What should we do with it?” Returning things doesn’t appear to be an option either. “The tribe’s descendants don’t know what this wicker thing is for either; they’ve all got mobile phones and drink Coke.” Sometimes she feels like she’s in the final scene of “Citizen Kane”, all “the artefacts heading for the fire. This, she said, sweeping her now-dirty glove around once more, isn’t fire; but it’s oblivion all the same.”

Imagine a museum of experience, a time capsule in which practices are kept alive. Perhaps you could partake in the revival of extinct languages and practices of another era. Or perhaps you could even inhabit worlds projected from the future into today’s time. It might be an invitation to tune and hone your sensorium, experiment with ways of feeling and perceiving differently. It’s not more equipment you’d need for such a journey, rather the realisation that we are technology ourselves, open to embodying past and future archives.After a speculative writing session, dancer Mariana Tengner Barros said it this way: “Understand that everything is in the detail. Change the scale. Minimize to observe. We develop, as masters, practices of perception, from different stimuli of the senses that we accept as valid and all the others for which we still do not have a name or form. We practice unknown dances, we practice what we don’t know with full will and dedication.”

Two more images with bright yellow and red colours have landed side by side in the map. A few years ago, several blast furnaces and containers to transport molten iron from the disused Phoenix West factory in Dortmund were sold and shipped to China. In a distant future they might travel back to the Ruhr area, transformed and embodied in an altogether different shape, their energy now contained in a fire-spitting Chinese dragon, with a large group of people dancing to hold up its cloth canopy high above their heads with sticks as the fabulous beast keeps on snaking and fuming.

In her first evening-length solo, Meg Stuart takes her body to the stage as an archive of memories, both of family life and her artistic career. In Hunter, running from 28 to 30 January at the Teatro Maria Matos, the choreographer and dancer is both the hunter and the prey.

There are sure to be a large number of respectable studies (from those who propose one thing, to the opposite, or the coexistence of both) arguing that anyone who finds themselves alone seeks immediate solace in the radio or television. There will even be those who argue that radio or television would be enough to remove the solitude from that equation. When we see Meg Stuart alone on stage playing out this game in which she is both hunter and prey, chasing her own tail in circles (“maybe all this makes me look a bit silly”, she laughs), it is not a solitary act. For the choreographer and dancer whose solos had, until now, only been short exercises in a break between two longer pieces (the sort that clean the palate or reset the timer before continuing the journey), Hunter is too populous a piece for any trace of solitude to be felt in the solo. In fact, Hunter is quite the opposite: a body used as an archive of real and fictional memories; a head flooded with voices; a reconstruction of her entire personal cartography for a stage on which, only with great lack of imagination, we will see only Meg Stuart.

“There is a lot of material in this piece and I am summoning voices, in a way”, she explains to Ípsilon. Sometimes, these are perfectly audible to the audience, including those of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs or an aunt, mixing the family history that she discovered when digging back seven generations (as suggested by a shaman) with a host of artists that helped to shape her movement. At other times, those voices are barely discernible and yet capable of suggesting references that are essentially presumed to be to Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown or Miranda July. Hunter “works as a series of self-portraits”, beginning with a collage of images, cut-ups and visual devices that Stuart uses to build the map on which she will go on to dance. In some sense, the piece is summarised in that idea: calling all possible pasts to the stage in order to perceive what Meg Stuart’s movement is made up of today, and to access them all without any obvious nexus. “For two years, I worked with a lot of people, using other people’s vocabulary, shaping their material and their movements”, she explains. “Then I became curious, after such a long period of time, to see how I was moving and how they all influenced this journey I have made with my work. I felt that while I have the energy and interest to perform, it was a good way to put Damaged Goods [her company] and my creative process into perspective.”

With Hunter, Meg Stuart is putting herself into the development of her own discourse. She has thought of and defined the body as a repository of memories for a long time, but never before has she taken this belief so literally and to such an extreme. Looking at her body and her movement as an archive, she decided to amplify and delve into it as far as possible. “I began to talk to my parents; look at photos of them; uncover our family history and the fictional elements that interested me; think about my cultural and artistic heroes; things that I liked to do when I was younger; music that influenced me…”, and all of this built up into a whole muddle of tracks which she lays out freely on stage.

Explosion of narratives
In Built to Last, Meg Stuart’s previous creation, the idea of the archive already fascinated her, only at that time it was her musical archive to which she was attuned. By moving into the personal domain, the choreographer is identifying a possible response to this previous piece; another form of digging down to try and see herself more clearly. It was in these excavations that Stuart found herself looking at a diary filmed by the Lithuanian filmmaker, Jonas Mekas: “a strange video about the importance of changing your opinion, in which he tells a story about Paris Hilton, saying that he believes in her and likes the way she talks about change.” Meg Stuart was ensnared by Mekas; she started following what he published and the filmmaker became “a sort of godfather, someone who helped bring the piece together.” He even authorised her to use the audio from that diary entry in which he talks about popular (and political) condemnation of changes in opinion, arguing that they are in fact symptomatic of a healthy character. “Change is not a bad thing” repeats Stuart, “it is the absence of change that is bad.”

In investigating her own choreographic language and what makes it flesh, Meg Stuart accepts the idea of transformation and uncertainty about her present. It is not a coincidence that, as well as following on from Built to Last, Hunter is also the fruit of the last five years spent working with the playwright Jeroen Peeters on the book ‘Are We Here Yet?’, about her career with Damaged Goods. Although Peeters has helped her in this “memory hunt”, one of the attractions of this creation was in fact in interrupting the interpretation of her movements, rhythms, materials and proposals by third parties (dancers). “In terms of choreography, perhaps it is a more advanced piece; it is possible that I simplify things by using dancers”, she says. Hunter therefore dispenses with the need to establish an order that others can share and work with; it does not appear concerned with defining a collective environment. Rather, it is about a sudden plunge into Meg Stuart’s chaotic, random and unbridled thoughts. “It is not easy to do. It is very cryptic and difficult to follow in the sense that I do not adopt a narrative”, she explains. “Americans always want to tell their life story and I am not doing that at all. It is a piece with many layers to it: an explosion of narratives.”

Creating a personal piece does not mean adopting a confessional tone, but Hunter does dedicate a block to the spoken record, which Meg Stuart has never tried before and in which she shares some “aspects” of her life, “although casually, without any theatricality”. “The power of language compared with movement is strange”, she marvels. “We can kill ourselves three times on stage, but say anything and it has another effect – it realises the desire for a personal relationship with the audience, moving from being an encounter to a desire for us to connect with each other.” This is something that does not displease her. In fact, Meg Stuart is amused by the idea that Hunter could seem like an excessive narcissistic obsession, simply because around her – somewhat as strange as it is cosy – there are always several ghosts following her every move.

A selective look back at the highly stimulating 28th edition of the Berlin Tanz Im August festival which ended in style with Meg Stuart’s wonderful new play Until Our Hearts Stop.

In order to give you an overall idea of this 2016 edition, let’s start with a few figures: in the space of a little more than 3 weeks, 26 plays were put on in 8 different venues in Berlin, brought together around Hebbel Am Ufer (HAU), an extremely dynamic theatre complex and the heart of the festival.

The figures are supposed to speak for themselves, but they don’t say much, nothing vital in any case. Putting all the plays together in the same indistinct ensemble, says nothing, for example, about the (very) big gap between Emanuel Gat’s Sunny - presented at the beginning of the festival - a play which is sadly far more scholarly than it is sunny, and Until Our Hearts Stop, Meg Stuart’s exhilarating new creation which was put on at the end of the three weeks. Characterised by a remarkable feel for space and the passage of time, this fiercely unclassifiable play originates in a dynamic that is both precise and erratic, rigorous and playful – a dynamic in which the three musicians present on stage (Samuel Halscheidt, Marc Lohr and Stefan Rusconi) are as involved as the six dancers/performers (Neil Callaghan, Jared Gradinger, Leyla Postalcioglu, Maria F. Scaroni, Claire Vivianne Sobottke and Kristof Van Boven). Struggling with the issue of togetherness, Meg Stuart expresses an imperious desire to live and create, showing everything through an exhilarating freedom of tone and movement, which results in a few well-known scenes (we are thinking, in particular, of the incredible pair of nudes). This is our pick of this Tanz Im August 2016.

Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods & Münchner Kammerspiele’s UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP started out as an exploration of the effect that being touched has upon us, and by extension, of where our boundaries lie. Meg Stuart began with contact improvisation, but quickly dispensed with its usual taboos – such as violence, or touching in sensitive places. To the looping, sometimes overwhelming jazz strains of Marc Lohr, Stefan Rusconi and Samuel Halscheidt, the six performers paw at, ambush and exploit one another every which way. They squeeze together onto a single sofa in order to pick and pull at one another, like children abandoning themselves to an explosive mix of curiosity, boredom and listlessness. Until they roll over the floor in a tangle of bodies and let rip in a no-holds-barred, stark naked dogfight and a ‘Dolle Mina’-style concert. Finally, they scamper across the stage like young foals that have just been turned out, before ending in an ardent embrace. This looks like absolute freedom. Both mentally and physically, it sweeps embarrassment aside.

Meg Stuart wanted to create a situation that went beyond simply role-playing, and to extend this into the theatre auditorium. So the performers also mix with the audience, where they hand out drinks, sit on someone’s lap or have their make-up applied by a spectator. UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP not only literally draws very near, but also turns out to be an unpredictable and capricious fantasy; something that is poised between a conjuring act and an esoteric ritual involving a great deal of dressing up. You constantly seem to be witnessing an original world in which everything could go in any direction, and in which the imagination knows no bounds. Only Kristof Van Boven stays above the fray, acting as the standard bearer for an adult audience that no longer wishes to take these kinds of excesses seriously, for fear of the implications.

What purpose is served by the long epilogue, in which Claire Vivianne Sobottke begs for love, attention, money and warmth, or by the collective ballet of incomprehensible signs with which the performance ends? You never quite work out how you are ultimately supposed to interpret this work, but the way in which Stuart takes you with her on a trip through our physical and psychological being, whilst avoiding every cliché, is unparalleled. Her performers dance, sing, curse and flirt as if their final hour has come. Stuart breaks open her linguistic idiom to create lyrical dance theatre that unites performers and spectators in admiration and, yes, love. It makes UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP the ultimate, whirling expression that a burning world longs for: faith in imagination and in each other.

The historical baggage isn’t a natural fit for choreographer Meg Stuart’s aesthetic, but she finds a new approach. In Built to Last, the mood stays light, bordering on irreverent, as the dancers assume historic movement patterns reminiscent of Isadora Duncan or German expressionist dance.

Meg Stuart sets herself a challenge before creating a new dance. The American choreographer, who is based in Brussels and Berlin, claims to develop an entirely new movement language for every piece as she collaborates with directors, visual artists, musicians and designers. Rather than following well-trodden routes, these works explore the edges of what is possible.

When she decided to use Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as a basis for her dance Built to Last, it didn’t seem like a novel departure. There is no new language emerging from sparky interactions with bolshie musicians here, just an acceptance of prewritten music from a dead composer.

But Beethoven’s masterpiece comes loaded with historical baggage that doesn’t find a natural home within Stuart’s aesthetic. Her response was not to overthink it. “I didn’t analyse the music’s structure or anything,” she says. “I just wanted to elicit a purely emotional response and discover what emerged when the music was simply listened to, rather than studied.”

The primary response was heroic. “It is said that people want to play Mozart, but want to conduct Beethoven. It’s large-scale music with an epic intensity. When you play it in your living room, your life becomes bigger.”

Composer Alain Franco joined the rehearsals as a kind of music dramaturg and suggested adding other composers, so the soundscore expanded into a rich tapestry of fragments by Dvorak, Rachmaninov, Schoenberg, Xenakis, Stockhausen and others.

“I felt that it was possible to make a very fresh human approach to these fragments of classics,” says Stuart. “There was a way to meet them in a real human way without being disrespectful.”

This openness is unusual within contemporary dance, where many choreographers have resisted the aural backdrop offered by classical music, fearful it might gentrify their incendiary aesthetic with plush sounds and a veneer of respectability.

Additionally, an association exists between classical music and ballet, whose narrative-driven choreography is antithetical to the conceptual purity pursued by many contemporary choreographers. But classical warhorses such as the Eroica can prove more than an aesthetic threat.

“Music in German history has a chequered past,” she says, referring to the appropriation of Beethoven, Wagner and other German composers by the Nazi regime. According to conductor Roger Norrington, “during the Nazi period, Beethoven’s Eroica was made to assume the mantle of the heroic German nation, either conquering, or suffering heroic defeat at Stalingrad.”

Mindful of this, Stuart quotes the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who claims: “The same music that served evil purposes can be redeemed to serve the good. Or it can be read in a much more ambiguous way. With music we cannot ever be sure. In so far as it externalises our inner passion, music is potentially always a threat.”

The threat is proportional to monumentality, a theme that quickly emerged in rehearsals for Built to Last. Unlike the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t nature of dance, classical music is preserved by ink on paper and, like the stone and bronze monuments within cityscapes, is a snapshot of history at a particular time.

Although approaches to interpreting Beethoven may change, dictated by performance trends, the essence of the composer’s intentions remains. Meg Stuart says: “If music can become a monument, then we need to question it and its power. History is a manner of perspective, not a question of being right or wrong.”

This questioning needs to be constant, as there is a danger of losing sight of the original meaning and intention behind a monument. During Built to Last, performer Kristof Van Boven reflects how “a monument is something you stumble upon as you go about your daily business. It imposes thoughts and memories, and makes it clear that the present has a past.”

Name that composer

Music has also constantly imposed itself on dance. Many orchestral masterpieces of the 19th and 20th century are the result of commissions from ballet and dance companies, yet most people would struggle to name the choreographers of Swan Lake, The Firebird, L’Après-Midi d’Un Faune, Seven Deadly Sins or Appalachian Spring.

In Built to Last, Stuart questions and “dances back” at this hierarchy by including a chunk of Trio A, a postmodern dance classic by the choreographer Yvonne Rainer. Performed in silence, the 1966 dance uses direct and functional movement that reflects Rainer’s infamous No Manifesto. Seeking to to divorce dance from any historical cliches, it opened with the lines: “No to spectacle; No to virtuosity; No to transformations and magic and make-believe.” Its inclusion in Built to Last is a reminder of the power of movement to assert aesthetic authority without the back-up of music.

With such a weighty subject matter, there is a danger that Built to Last could be self-involved and yawnsome, but Stuart insists the mood stays light, bordering on irreverent, as the dancers assume historic movement patterns reminiscent of Isadora Duncan or German expressionist dance. These quotations aren’t included to reward dance geeks but contrive to change the dancers into “time travellers” that embody a particular fragment of music with historical empathy and the self-knowledge of the present.

“There is a lot of humour in the piece and the dancers are constantly pushing borders and boundaries. They don’t just present this holy untouchable music, but a way to construct their own reality within it. This is true freedom.”

Built to Last: An epic on the shoulders of musical warhorses
Dublin Dance Festival review

Meg Stuart’s questions some classical music myths in her new show, and makes something uplifting amid the sturm und drang.

Four stars ****

In taking on classical music warhorses, choreographer Meg Stuart has created a theatrical experience equally epic. Sprawling across two hours, Built to Last throws stones at monuments to the past, questioning our tacit relationship with bombastic expressions of heroism and ultimately presents an uplifting affirmation of the human spirit.

Fourteen excerpts are used as metaphors for historical narrative. Stuart questions how this music can be appropriated and given an immovable mythical status, even though our perceptions of history constantly change. Actor Kristof Van Boven quotes Beethoven: “What’s in our hearts and in our souls must find a way out”, an antidote to another Beethoven quotation claiming that “eventually, music is always a threat”. This is the tension underpinning the entire performance: how does the individual interact with prescribed versions of history?

Sometimes the performers confront the blaring pomposity face-on with manic jerky movements on the edge of self-control, as in the case of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. At other times they approach the music as time travellers, responding to the sounds with a contemporary vocabulary, like the German Expressionist dance that matches Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.

It’s not all serious. Aside from Van Boven’s quips to the audience, some images are deliberately funny, like Van Boven and fellow performers Anja Müller and Davis Freeman appearing in a kind of a Victorian museum case, or Müller as a Wagnerian-like Goddess-heroine up among the revolving planets. The overall effect is complemented with energetic and pitch-perfect performances by the five performers, that include Maria F Scaroni and Dragana Bulut.

First, the body. Solid. Upright. It begins to sway. Then the hand, seeking simple gestures, clenching and unclenching. Next the arm, extended, bending, seeking shape and form. The urge gradually brings all parts of the body to movement and from there to motion. Set against an electronic soundscape, five performers relentlessly seek, find and are frustrated by patterns, culminating in a cacophony of movement and sound before one of the performers quietly brings the others to a halt before turning to nervously address the audience. So begins Built to Last, by renowned choreographer, Meg Stuart, making her Irish debut and kicking off the Dublin Dance Festival 2015 with an excellent production that sets the bar high.

When describing itself as a history of dance, Built to Last does itself a great disservice. For it speaks not just to the history of dance, but to the making of dance, to the need of the body to give expression, with or without music. Of an insatiable urge that can find momentarily release in forms and patterns, none ever big enough to accommodate all that needs to be expressed. Indeed, at times classical musical forms, if momentarily merging with the body’s expressiveness, seem to inhibit it, hamper it, forcing the body to break out and seek new pathways. At times fleetingly recognisable moments appear, tender tableaux temporarily take shape before passing away in the search for newer forms. At other times it appears as if the lunatics have taken over the asylum as the struggle to find shape grapples with restrictions and the need for form. If all is shifting, what never changes is the striving for expression, the endless searching, the body constantly reaching out to catch the stars and channel all that heaven will allow.

Co-produced by Meg Stuart’s, Brussels based Damaged Goods and Munich’s Münchner Kammerspiele, Built to Last is a wonderful, innovative, and often humorous exploration of the making and history of dance. Self-consciously self-deprecating at times, it never ceases to engage, despite its uninterrupted two hours in length. Performers Dragana Bulut, Davis Freeman, Anja Müller, Maria F.Scaroni and Kristof Van Boven give a delightful ensemble performance, as well as creating exquisite individual moments. Stuart’s sensitive yet powerful choreography, at times delicate, wild, playful, was always revealing the vulnerability and humanity beneath, as well as her deep love and passion for dance. The only thing to do is surrender to it.

If dance forms aren't built to last, dance surely will as evidenced by this charming, insightful and, at times, sublime production. A must see.

Three women and three men build towers and bridges with their bodies. In groups of three or four, they twist and entangle their bodies. It’s barely visible, which arms and legs belong to which face. Now they dance in colourful pants or sweaters, other times they’re topless or, later on, even stark naked. All this is not new. We’ve seen it before in many contemporary dance pieces. But in UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP, a piece by choreographer Meg Stuart, the dancers go further, sniffing each other and tickling their partner’s bare skin, making no difference between man or woman. The nose gets a run for its money; its urge to explore does not stop at the pubic border. Irony, parody, comedy and genuine feelings are mingled together in this sensuous composition of body images, that Meg Stuart is now presenting at PACT Zollverein as part of the Ruhrtriennale.

Meg Stuart doesn’t break boundaries; she crosses them in this cleverly composed performance that oscillates between a heated drum allegro and a trance-like piano. Here are two naked women, sitting in front of each other, their legs apart, tickling each other’s labia with their feet. Then there are three men, massaging each other’s abdomen, back and buttocks. But this piece, which goes on for two hours without a break, has nothing to do with voyeurism. As much as the performers play with each other’s limbs, they do so as innocent, silly children. Carelessly and naive, they run free, rub each other and throw each other around. Some of them frequently comment their own actions.

The way Meg Stuart engages the audience without making it feel uncomfortable is extraordinary. In a fully lit theatre, the spectators receive water, fruit and cake. They are offered clay to give their hand muscles a work out as the piece continues. Unrestrained, the performers talk to visitors, spray cologne or open their shirt and ask spectators to smell their sweat. The fact that they are willing to do so proves that Meg Stuart has succeeded in making the audience become a licentious partner in crime.

Until Our Hearts Stop marks a fresh step in the research that the choreographer Meg Stuart has been engaged in for more than two decades. She tirelessly attempts to pin down the strange interplay between what we feel physically and what we experience mentally, and in so doing, she rarely leaves the viewer unmoved.

This research departs ever further from the shape of a classic ‘performance’. More and more, it is about experiments in which not only the performers, but also the spectators have a role to play. She regularly confronts viewers head on with the inherent difficulties of the human condition, which can leave them confused.

In Highway 101 (2000-2002), for example, she dragged the spectators through a building, before unexpectedly abandoning them to weirdos who went on to indulge in some embarrassing rants. People often had no idea how to behave. All Together Now (2005) tore up theatrical conventions still further. It began with the audience being packed into a space that was far too small, while a voice expressed disgust at the ensuing sweat and odours. It ended with a feel-good session in which everyone was entreated to hold hands. Some felt that they could have died of embarrassment.

But as ever, this is precisely her point: why do we hate it so much when other people come too close to us? Why do we long for others, yet bolt if someone comes closer? What can we tolereate from one another, and what not? This is endlessly fascinating to watch, as Stuart always manages to find fresh ways of exploring this theme, and never fails to unsettle.

The same is true of her new work UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP. The piece wrong-foots you to such as extent that at a certain point half way through, you barely know whether you are coming or going. To the overpowering jazzy sounds of the trio Samuel Halscheidt, Marc Lohr and Stefan Rusconi, the six performers have already groped, stalked and made use of one another in every conceivable way.

It all begins with a strange yoga session, followed by an equally strange acrobatics exercise. After this, all six performers plonk themselves down on a sofa together. Whether out of boredom or embarrassment, they pick at one another until they are rolling over the floor in a knot of bodies. Two men become embroiled in a dogfight. Two women separate them, before immediately going on to attack one another with equal savagery - and stark naked - before winding up in an intimate embrace.

The fourth wall is breached
An hour of these edgy, absurd scenes culminates in a synchronous dance comprised of incomprehensible signals. Just as you have almost given up trying to understand it, the mood shifts. The spectators are suddenly involved in the action, whether they like it or not. The performers offer drinks and presents, sing birthday songs or stage a variety show. In the meantime, Kristof Van Boven may act as though he has been imprisoned behind glass, but the ‘fourth wall’ between the viewer and the performer has clearly been broken down.

The performance then takes a magical turn, both literally and figuratively, with conjuring tricks and a mysterious ritual involving incense and a drum roll. However, the mood is abruptly broken by the heartrending speech of a lone woman who endlessly begs for attention and love for her pitiful self. This is reminiscent of the weird, embarrassing figures that appeared in Highway 101.

Although you are aware that this is only theatre, it still makes you uncomfortable: with this scene, Meg Stuart holds up a mirror to us all. She illustrates how desperately we long for contact and attention, until our hearts stop. But you are left alone with that uncomfortable feeling, because the performance ends here. Until such time as Stuart comes to knit another chapter onto this endless tale.

‘People say that I’m shy.’ This is how Meg Stuart begins her monologue, turning to face the public with some trepidation. The American choreographer, who has been living in Berlin for several years now, has created her first evening length solo at the age of 49. Hunter is a search for, and a testing of, yourself – and undoubtedly Stuart’s most personal creation to date. With her unremitting distortions and displacements she proves, yet again, the expressive power of the body.
However, the evening’s big surprise is that Meg Stuart herself reads aloud a lengthy text – and at the end even goes as far as to sing. She explains her so-called embarrassment: ‘I have not trusted words for a long time.’

And then she begins to talk: about her parents, who were both directors and who ran a community theatre. ‘I have seen so many bad actors’, she admitted, ‘that I promised myself never to say a word on stage.’

The performance is about the memories that have brought her to this point, and that she has poured into words. Meg Stuart explores how experiences leave their imprints on your body – a constantly recurring theme with her.

In Hunter, she again opts for a multimedia approach and works with a range of materials. At the beginning we see her sitting at a table, lost in thought, cutting up black and white photos from her personal photo album and then arranging the cuttings. In one photo, the faces of a mother and child are replaced by animal heads; other photos are painted over with nail varnish, or have shiny paper stuck on top of them. The soundtrack is a collage of different musical works, sounds and voices.
Two women speak about the fallout from a divorce, another woman reports on a feminist who tries and fails to ruffle a playboy bunny. A broken male voice lectures about the need for change. Private life and philosophy, humour and profundity go hand in hand.

The scenographer Barbara Ehnes has built a spacious construction for Meg Stuart, constructed from Plexiglas and metal tubes, which covers the stage like a screen. As a result, the space is already alive with meaning when Meg Stuart finally takes to the stage. She then lies down on the ground and starts, as though she is charged with electricity. Her body is under huge pressure. She flounders and shakes, throws her arms around and jumps up. She is totally subject to the uncontrolled movements of her body. In Hunter it is as though her insides are being torn. The variation in her syntax of movement is unique. The scene in which she only uses her arms is overwhelming. Her arms begin to lead a disturbing life of their own. They knot together, become entwined, break free again and only allow themselves to calm down when they are forced to do so. Creating phantasmagorias of the body that are so grotesque and amusing is Meg Stuart’s greatest strength.

In the flickering projections, you see the father, or the young daughter showing off her first dance steps. Chris Kondek’s videos have an almost surreal effect. They show Meg Stuart revolving as if in a trance, or a Stuart who is exploring her body as if it were a strange object. Meg Stuart moves between extremely divergent emotional states. For example, she suddenly sinks into an extremely colourful patchwork tent with a series of side-arms. Childhood is never completely over. At a different point, she takes to the stage with her upper body bared, hiding behind a long, blonde wig.

Meg Stuart is one of the most influential choreographers of the contemporary dance scene. Since she has been linked to HAU Hebbel am Ufer as an artist in residence, her career has once again been given a boost. Her creations can now be seen regularly, and are almost always sold out. In Hunter she now shows that she is not only a collector, but also a hunter. She picks up the things she finds and digs into the deepest layers of memory. The evening is a little like a séance, but its painful obsessiveness diminishes at the end. The dancer accepts her past, which has a liberating effect. She concludes with an amusing speech in which she sends all those shamans, life coaches and craniosacral therapists packing.

DANCE The sum of different parts: in her solo Hunter at HAU2, Meg Stuart examines the concept of the body as an archive full of memories

It’s a minor sensation: twenty years after founding her company Damaged Goods, the choreographer Meg Stuart is on stage alone all evening for the first time.

The premiere in HAU 2 of Hunter (that will also be performed in Essen, Venice, Geneva, Zürich and Brussels) was a meeting place for many who had brought her fascinating early works like appetite, Visitor’s only and Alibi to Berlin as curators in the late nineties, or who had breathlessly followed them as colleagues, critics or spectators.

In short, she danced for a crowd of Meg Stuart fans. She rewarded their loyalty with a performance that once again personally highlights her style and her unique ability to create moods. Cutting; tearing; daubing; turning on unusual axes; creating new compositions; distorting and accelerating. These are the techniques that you often see in her choreographies, used alongside everyday movements and dance movements. However, for the first time, she also applies this approach to images. With her back to the audience, Meg Stuart sits at a table messing around with scissors, felt tips, glue, photo clippings and other fragments of memory. A camera projects this, much enlarged, onto a piece of fabric. Everything recognisable changes continually in front of our eyes.

This principle of a collage already alludes to Meg Stuart’s astonishing talent: her ability to use unusual accents to transform her own body into something where individual limbs, for example hands and arms, can lead their own lives. She starts to dance in swinging, shocking movements to a soundscape consisting of all kinds of sound fragments that change in under a second. The movements become mechanical, graceful, fragile and aggressive. The most contradictory emotions and situations are brought together in a highly compact way. Even though they are impossible to name, the movements do not appear abstract. Time and time again, they approach a form of emotional expression or physical state.

The battle for memories that simply do not want to become clear is a dramatic element that plays out here in the unique and fragile body of the choreographer. Super 8 family films and childhood photos are regularly beamed onto a series of projection surfaces. The voices of an old man and an old woman who are trying to express in detail the way things once were can also be heard. At the end, Meg Stuart takes a purring projector whose speed has been adjusted incorrectly, and the snowy image it projects creates an eventful void. Slowly the image moves to the ceiling and fades out. Such expressive visual and acoustic elements create a reference context for the dance. As well as allusions to the biographical and the personal, there are images of burning houses or bleeding mouths whipping past at high speed. What makes many of Meg Stuart’s creations so exceptional is this fascination with the catastrophic, the panicky, and the uncertainty about the ground beneath our feet. But the difference this time lies in the embarrassment and the toughness, the vulnerability and the violence as facets of one person; as a part of her past.

Lighting (Jan Maertens), sound design (Vincent Malstaf), scenography (Barbara Ehnes) and video (Chris Kondek) combine to create a space that is not so much a solitary environment, but a tiny fragment of a universe: a world filled with private moments and more universal events. In this world, objects – such as a gleaming foil that changes colour in different lights – connect with the dancer to form moving installations. This creates the effect of seeing, and at the same time not seeing, her body, and the balling of the light that can expand into a space. It is all rather ominous, a little unworldly, and over before you know it.

Meg Stuart mistrusts words. She says so herself. If you don’t want to, or cannot, stay silent, you had better take your time. It is worth trying to use many words, and expressing them as if each were of equal importance. You can incorporate images, sounds, movements and materials in this. You can show a great deal of all sorts of things behind, beside and layered on top of one another; mix fiction and truth, documents and moods, memories and dreams, the visible and the invisible, your own thoughts and those of others. The key thing about Hunter is its idiosyncrasy, which it approaches in multiple phases. Or rather, the opportunity to get to know Meg Stuart’s idiosyncrasy. Meg Stuart as an artist, as a woman, and as a human being invites us to discover the world from the perspective of her questions and positions, but at the same time, to understand their origins. ‘I think that changing one’s mind is one of the best things there is’ we hear Jonas Mekas’ voice assert, more than an hour and a half into the performance. This is easy, indeed very easy to understand.

For over twenty years, Meg Stuart has been working in the fields of dance and theatre on projects with a wide variety of forms and performance formats. However, Hunter is the first solo she has created for herself that is designed to fill a whole evening. The idea of a solo, especially in the field of dance, can rapidly lead you astray. Hunter certainly does not herald Meg Stuart’s conversion to the small scale. Her announcement that she intends to study her body as if it were an archive is also misleading. Body memory, so personal and difficult to share, is Meg Stuart’s starting point in a search for hope, community and utopias. One can argue in many respects that Hunter is major piece and leans towards a Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art].

In addition to the choreography on the stage, a number of other artists were involved with Hunter. The dramaturge Jeroen Peeters provided the audience with two pages of text that are very much worth reading and keeping. The text contains all sorts of expressions of the creative process, and draws on the ideas of Charlotte Selver, Yoko Ono, Miranda July and many others. The sound designer Vincent Malstaf designed a collage of sounds, lieder (chiefly from the 80s) and electronic music. This provides a structure for the performance and also perhaps for the house in which Meg Stuart paces about. It is an overcrowded house that does not actually do anything, apart from continually recounting stories. This both amuses and disturbs us. It alternates between silence and howling. The scenographer Barbara Ehnes constructed a giant sculpture made of extra large craft materials on the HAU2 stage. And sure enough, the evening begins with a glitter, moss and photo collage of Meg Stuart herself. The costume designer Claudia Hill worked on the same principle: there must be a lot of everything, meanings cannot be pinned down into fixed categories, and every phase of the performance demands that the performer be presented differently. The lighting designer Jan Maertens shaped the opening or (protective) closing off of the stage, and the possibilities of seeing and being seen. And last but not least, the video artist Chris Kondek used the three projection surfaces for a montage of photos and video recordings. He created a composition using clippings, raw material, and overlapping images, often of people and often of landscapes. Although it actually revolves around autobiographical documents, outsiders, who know nothing and no one, do not understand its true character.

Hunter’s décor is both playful and secretive, a rhizome. There is apparently no hierarchical structure between the elements and their meanings. Coincidentally, what this world shows and tells us is just like the world in our heads. At the same time, the evening is highly structured. A well-prepared programme comes to fruition, and the décor does not obscure this.

Phase one: handicraft session with Meg Stuart, live broadcast of detailed recordings, private- and other photos, and manipulation of the visual material. Later, Meg Stuart says: ‘I don’t believe that my father still has a good memory, because he’s forever telling his stories over and over again.’ It is some time before we see Meg Stuart’s face. She stands, walks, kneels down, does not dance and does not look in front of her. And even when she does look at the audience, we can barely see her face. Hair, hands or arms block our view. The first movements look like clichés, or extremely compact extracts from her own choreographies. In the meantime, she gives the impression of being distraught. She paces about.

Phases three and four, or five; in any case the final one: Meg Stuart gets dressed again. Eventually, at last, she has really danced. In silence, she improvises with dance material and changes her expression numerous times. For specific, extremely short moments, she is totally relaxed and happy. There is a lot you could say about this. But now only the following can be said: everything that happened up to this moment was necessary. So Meg Stuart can now put on a lifejacket and pin on a microphone. The first thing we hear her say is: ‘I am shy.’ Anyone who has known her for a while … hmm … still thinks so. Meg Stuart as an entertainer. Surprising. She goes on to talk in an increasingly less desperate way about all sorts of things. She makes no distinction between the intimate and the public, between the banal and the visionary. She asks about our future. There is nothing to suggest that there is any kind of calculation behind her words. This is not often the case, and it is thus extraordinary. It touches us, but in a totally unsentimental way – and will also irritate some people. It was a very special evening, a gift.

Twenty years after setting up her company Damaged Goods, Meg Stuart is staging her first, evening-length solo. Oddly enough, solos offer an inherent promise of truthfulness. As an artist, there is nothing you can behind – other than yourself. And it so happens that this is precisely what Stuart does, without equal, in Hunter. She conceals and then exposes herself in a capricious stream of images, movements, video and sound. The result is a kaleidoscope of mirror images whose contours blur before your very eyes. Stuart plays this game of ‘seeing and being seen’ against a striking backdrop created by Barbara Ehnes. Copper pipes emerge from a Perspex tube several metres high and extend deep into the hall. Stuart’s hunting den is like a childhood tepee, but a life-size version and without the canvas tent. This serves to immediately highlight the ambition behind Hunter, which is to turn the personal inside out. The performance begins with the choreographer sitting at a table, working on a kind of collage. Old family snaps and a photo of Yoko Ono are covered in glitter, while cuttings fastened with pins are re-arranged and set alight. Here, you see in microcosm what Hunter is about to do for the next two hours on a larger scale: namely trace the biographical and artistic tracks that have made Stuart who she is today. Mind you, the image with which you are presented is anything but objective. We see a puzzling collage of snapshots that have been eroded by memory, coloured in by the imagination, and which have imprinted themselves on Stuart’s muscles and skin. The pins in the photographs work like acupuncture, and this becomes apparent when she hesitantly begins to dance. Her arms and legs are like antennae that pick up the strangest frequencies. Vincent Malstaf’s ingenious soundtrack also sounds like a radio transmitter, one that is constantly skipping from station to station. Quotes from Stuart’s heroes Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs are intermingled with excerpts from interviews and pop songs from her childhood days. Super-8 films of her late brother Robert (whose death we learn about later) and American beaches loom up like grainy after-images, while Chris Kondek’s surreal videos throw this dream landscape wide open. And as if he is trying to paint Stuart’s chakra, Jan Maertens bathes the scene in the most beautiful rainbow of colours. This is no less than a synthesis of the arts, a thrilling phantasmagoria. Hunter shows us a thousand faces and demands the same number of eyes to take it all in. She moves from being aggressive to being vulnerable; from the minimalistic to the grotesque; from being someone who mumbles and distrusts words to a person who ‘blogs’ live about art and urbanism. The elusive Stuart transforms herself from one shadow into another, with her body as the only tangible reality. A voice repeatedly intones ‘all you see is real, very real’. And yes, you will rarely come closer to the truth about a person (or perhaps the whole of mankind) than you do here: that she does not exist, however doggedly we might pursue her.

Beautiful cutting up and reassembling the past: Hunter by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods

Some performances are gone the next day. Forgotten. Some stay with you a little longer. And some keep on popping up in your mind. Such as Hunter, the first evening-length solo by Meg Stuart. I watched the American choreographer perform it a couple of months ago in Essen, and scenes and images from it have been coming back to me regularly, since. Hunter, a piece about memories. The Venice Biennale wanted it on its programme last June, and the well-respected German magazine tanz awarded Meg Stuart the title choreographer of the year for it. The piece will have its Belgian premiere this week at Kaaitheater, Brussels.

A first of a special kind. After a career spanning twenty years, Hunter is actually Meg Stuart’s first evening-length solo. It premiered in Berlin (March 2014). It is a piece centered around memories, but it is certainly not solely about the past, as it is strangely contemporary too.
It bears a resemblance to Sketches/Notebook, the previous piece by the American choreographer and her Belgian-based company Damaged Goods: Hunter also consists of a series of scenes in which Stuart mixes movement with elements from visual arts (colors, light, video, the texture of things) and theatre. It is set to a dizzying soundscape (by Vincent Malstaf): an impressive collage of sounds, music and spoken word, which makes you wonder afterwards: did I really hear Willem Vermandere, Question Mark & The Mysterians ánd Jonas Mekas?

Look at what my body is doing. I don’t know any other performer able to so skilfully detach her persona from the movements her body is making. As if she herself is amazed by what those arms are coming up with, oh and look how they move in a completely unexpected way. Hunter comprises once again one of those sequences Meg Stuart is extremely good at. It looks as if her body is an antenna, and it keeps on receiving different signals, from one surprise to the next. In this case: switching from one memory to the next. From one remembered movement to another one. The body as a brain: remembering. Just as that soundscape seems to be continuously switching channels too, jumping from music to spoken word.

Its one of the scenes that have been coming back to me. The beginning, I clearly remember as well, Meg Stuart sitting at a little desk, cutting up family pictures and then rearranging them, in what looks like an artist’s lab. Or that moment she all of a sudden starts talking, almost in a stand up-comedy sort of way. Explaining why she tried to stay away from talking on stage, and then telling an amusing story that jumps from Trisha Brown to Casper The Friendly Ghost and kundalini yoga. I remember the color orange. Carpets. A set design mixing a spiderweb with a circus tent. And then that fantastic scene in which a pair of speakers descend from above and Meg Stuart starts singing with Yoko Ono.
I also clearly remember sitting there, in the bar, afterwards, perplexed by this information overload, wondering what to make of it. There’s no denying that once again Hunter proves how gifted Meg Stuart is as a contemporary choreographer, mixing all those different elements, distorting them, exactly knowing what to do with them, sensing when it’s time to move on to the next scene. All of it is real, I was told afterwards. The photos, the video footage, the voices (her brother): it all really is from her past. And so Hunter combines life (family) and work (influences). But it is not about the puzzle, about trying to put all the pieces together as a viewer, about figuring out what the link is between exhibit A and memory B, about lessons learned.

For years I’ve written a diary, because I wanted to hold on to the past. Until I realized that it was no use. There is no way you can capture everything, and remember everything. Hunter reminded me of that feeling. It presents someone trying to tell you about everything she is made up of, but knowing that ultimately it’s no use, trying to talk about everything. But you’ve lived a life, you’ve collected thoughts, sounds and images along the way. Hunter is the Meg Stuart way of dealing with that, and she does so, not only in a strangely beautiful, but also in a very contemporary way, in this world in which everybody is coping with an information overload. It’s as a (very distorted) Pinterest page coming alive.

A small, cumbersome figure wrapped in a heavy robe of layered quilts, her mouth stuck in a grimace, each foot shackled to a sack of bricks as if about to be drowned. A picture that hurts, even if there is no story to accompany it – no tragedy, not even a scream. Arranged into this static-looking image, the dancer and choreographer Meg Stuart drags herself across the floor in her latest work Sketches/Notebook (2013). At the other end of the room, costume designer Claudia Hill, who dressed Stuart beforehand, strips her back down to her thin, naked skin.

Designers and live musicians are often seen on stage as performers in Stuart’s productions. The entire first part of Sketches belongs to Hill. Again and again, she readies the dancers for a brief photo shoot before tidily hanging all the props back on the clothes racks. These are acts without consequences, anti-processes like eating fast food, writing job applications, fruitless shopping trips. In BLESSED (premiered in 2007 at Berlin’s Volksbühne), it was Jean-Paul Lespagnard who dressed the dancer Francisco Camacho (soaked, like the cardboard palm tree and swan props, by the artificial cloudburst on stage) in a beach towel and a death mask. The scene may be paradise or a typhoid-infested swamp, but at least the issue of style has been taken care of.

Asked whether her tendency to turn the stage into a dressing room points to a hidden Marie Antoinette complex, Stuart answers: ‘So not!’ Instead, she explains her need for designers by saying that ‘individualities are incomplete’. The artist herself is without makeup, in a brown vintage pullover, hex bleached blonde hair tousled. The last two years have been restless but highly productive, with shows as different as the excessive VIOLET (premiered at PACT Zollverein, Essen in 2011), the eternal lottery of Built to Last (premiered at the Kammerspiele in Munich in 2012) and now the choreographic journal, Sketches/Notebook (premiered at Berlin’s Hebbel-am-Ufer in 2013). Damaged Goods, the company Stuart founded in 1994, is based in Brussels but her apartment is in Berlin. For the past two years, she had a project-based residency at the Kammerspiele in Munich and a fresh alliance is now beginning with Annemie Vanackere, the new manager and artistic director of Berlin’s hip Hebbel-am-Ufer (HAU). After her partnerships with Zurich’s Schauspielhaus and Berlin’s Volksbühne, this is a further, albeit loose association with a specific theatre.

Few of her European colleagues can match this record. Apart from Stuart, it is rare for contemporary choreographers to be offered residences at theaters where dance is not part of the usual programme. One high-profile exception was the experiment by Thomas Ostermeier and Sasha Waltz at Berlin’s Schaubühne, from 1999–2004, which came to an end for financial reasons. To hear Stuart tell the story, it sounds like her own career came about more by chance than design. Maybe that is part of her secret.

Sketches is now being staged as a striking start to her time at HAU. As so often in Stuart’s works, the light in the space seems to be filtered through celluloid. The quilted lady mentioned before also made a previous appearance, featuring under the working title Blanket Lady in the performance Moments (2012) at ZKM in Karlsruhe. This lady with the aura of a sad down-and-out queen, like something straight out of a Samuel Beckett play, gives an idea of the basic mood of many pieces by Stuart: the party is allays already over, even when, as in Visitors Only (2003), it is still in full swing. There are faint glows at some points, but otherwise plenty of aimlessness and meaninglessness, mixed with a sense of somnambulistic resignation. In an interview with artist Catherine Sullivan in 2008, Stuart commented: ‘there is nothing I like more than to see someone on stage attempting an impossible task.’ Adding: ‘I only realized two years ago that my dancers had been performing a perverse form of slapstick all these years.’

Although there are pieces like Maybe Forever (2007) and BLESSED that hint at psychological figures or deal with specific relationship issues, even today the bodies of Stuart’s performers are more shells and sensory apparatuses than characters. They are somatic bodies that shiver, articulate ticks, pull faces, get in a whirl, become entangled. Not tied to any particular soul, they are traumatic dream dancers, free of pathos, imprisoned in a vegetative fabric of interconnected movements. The ‘empty body’ is an important artistic tool for Stuart, as are her studies of trancelike states, providing a base from which the body can become a container and a laboratory of mixed emotions. This may also be what gives her works their often contemplative, even meditative quality, in spite of the aggressive music and abrupt scene changes. But this does not mean relaxation in the conventional sense. More of a David Lynch-like Mulholland Drive feeling, a perpetual nervousness that lasts and lasts until it has established a level of its own, becoming absolute.

Stuart’s oeuvre as a whole is also a kind of container, open to influences from almost every field of the arts. During her time in New York in the 1980s and early ’90s, she lived in SoHo, visiting several galleries a day. With hindsight, she says her sense of choreographic space was very much shaped by her studies of pictorial composition. This led to many collaborations with artists including Gary Hixl, Ann Hamilton and Pierre Coulibeuf. In her book on Stuart, Bild in Bewegung und Choreographie (Image in Motion and Chorography, 2008), art theorist Annamira Jochim, who has spent years analyzing the artist’s works, inverts this relationship, looking for aspects of an expanded definition of the performativity of pictures. Material for this approach is provided above all by the different viewing angles in spatially fragmented choreographies like Highway 101 (2000) and Visitors Only. This line of argument is strengthened by the Sketches aesthetic with its partial audience mobility (during the performance, a whole row of seats is periodically placed on one of the artist’s signature ramps).

Stuart’s formats remain hard to pin down, however. The ‘pure’ dance of VIOLET (2011) was followed by Built to Last, absurd theoretical ballet danced by actors under raucous loudspeakers spewing distorted classical music, from Beethoven to Stockhausen. This was unusual for a choreographer who otherwise makes very deliberate use of live music. The almost moral perspective on humans, appearing animal-like under the monumentality of their cultural products, was another surprise. Choreographed and stage managed through and through, the piece is also likely to have alienated some fans, while coming as a relief to others. The audience must put up with this – after all, Stuart is not known for letting conceptual statements limit her scope for action. Surrendering to the process is the true constant across all the variation in her works: whether she is hosting workshops with a witch from New York in Stolzenhagen, the summer home of Berlin’s dance scene, or setting her performers on collision course with planets in a staged firmament. Perhaps her first experience in the theatre at age six was a formative one in this respect: coming from a theatrical family – her mother and father were directors, her grandfather a minstrel – she helped out as a substitute diminished witch’ in The Wizard of Oz. The reason? ‘Because the other girl got afraid.’

Translated by Nicholas Grindell

Astrid Kaminski is based in Berlin. She writes on literature, dance and performance for a number of newspapers and magazines.

Why do we erect monuments? This is the tantalising question raised by Meg Stuart’s Built to Last. In both dance and visual language, as much as in the choice of music, Stuart and her performers try to breath new life into cultural monuments, and to give us something akin to love and comfort. Ultimately, the dancers fail in their intention, although they do their very best. Built to Last has it all: an arsenal of impressive images, virtuoso players and exciting waves of music that keeps the viewer on the edge of his seat. Built to Last is like a journey that provides us with the space to think about who and what we are. Liberating.

Choreographer Meg Stuart was artist-in-residence at Hebbel am Ufer and performed two of her pieces there in January.

Every performing artist’s dream is to be given an empty theatre for a whole month, to gather a handful of colleagues and to rehearse with no particular goal. This dream came true for American choreographer Meg Stuart when HAU intendant Annemie Vanackere offered her exclusive use of the HAU 3. In the small black box of an attic room, the choreographer created Sketches/Notebook, a sort of chamber play. The XXL predecessor to Sketches/Notebook – Stuart’s monumental Built to Last, created in 2012 at the Münchner Kammerspiele – was performed in HAU’s main building shortly before the première of this smaller ‘mini’ production.

The experience of balancing a large project at a ‘civic theatre’ and an experimental project in HAU 3 was evidently to the congenial American’s taste. For years, she has been commuting between Brussels (the headquarters of her company, Damaged Goods) and Berlin, not to mention a whole host of other places while on tour.

In the meantime, Meg Stuart’s art, which is hard to pin down as merely art, has even won official recognition. She was recently awarded the Konrad-Wolf Prize by Berlin’s Akademie der Künste. Stuart describes this as a milestone in her career, for her 10-year old son at least. ‘Since then, he’s been coming to the studio, and he wants to become a dancer. It certainly gave him new confidence in his mother’s art!’

In her awards ceremony acceptance speech, Stuart spoke frankly. She summed herself up as a choreographer ‘who sometimes creates difficult pieces’. Which was very magnanimous and, at the same time, a way of forgiving all those who have walked out of her productions over the last twenty years. Indeed, since her European début Disfigure Study, which made a lasting impression at the Belgian Klapstuk Festival, dozens of spectators have walked out of her performances. On the other hand, there is also a die-hard community of fans and enthusiasts, who even heap praise on weaker works such as the fault lines (2010). Anyone who has been following Meg Stuart’s work over the years will have seen duds like this from time to time, just as they will have experienced wonderful moments like the recent Violet – a frontal attack on all the senses launched in 2011.

HAU intendant Annemie Vanackere has mentored Stuart’s career right from the start, and is convinced that ‘there is no one else who crosses and tears up boundaries so emphatically, and in so doing, places impressive sculptures of an interior life within a space.’ This was not the only reason that Vanackere offered the improvisation specialist the use of the HAU 3 as a workshop. After all, Stuart has been artistically homeless since her association with the Volksbühne ended in 2010.In her wintry isolation, Stuart worked on Sketches/Notebook with a crew of nine performers in total peace. Unlike the performance Built to Last, which was supported by the huge infrastructure of a civic theatre, the attic room in HAU forced her to be modest in every way. It was this tight fit that stimulated the choreographer’s imagination, enabling her to get both feet back on the ground after the mega-production in Munich. ‘Large and small-scale performances have always been equally important to me. The contrast prevents you from becoming lazy. In the end, every work feels like a trek across the mountaintops – the thing you have only just built is then demolished. It’s always a paradoxical process.’

Sketches/Notebook is a programmatic title that not only stresses the fleeting moment, but also wants to get beneath the surface. ‘On the one hand, sketches are something very hurried and hastily composed, but they always capture the essence.’ The nine-strong team – five performers, musicians, a scenographer and a costume designer – conducted a graphic experiment with light and shadows. Just like designing a notebook. At the same time, Stuart once again wanted to ‘bring inner questions and conflicts out into the open’, thus remaining loyal to the leitmotiv that runs through her work. Behind this, as Stuart admits, is the wish to articulate the typical traits of modern life: a lack of freedom combined with a longing for communality. ‘Things are opening up,’ she believes, ‘we have lost all our certainties, but haven’t found the courage to try out other social models.’ No one can accuse her of being faint-hearted. Meg Stuart has always been a risk taker, and will always be aesthetically unpredictable.

A cowbell, lots of marbles rolling over the floor, a bag lady from outer space, and a drum kit producing sound without a drummer. I promise it will happen to you too. After Sketches/Notebook by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, you’ll find yourself sitting in the bar, with a smile on your face, humming the theme of a big blockbuster movie, slighty confused, trying to remember all the things you’ve just seen. Serious? Sketches/Notebook is a dance performance with such a kaleidoscopic scope that it ends up being something much more than a dance piece. Art collectors should be bidding for it.

As you enter the room, a pompous movie theme is playing. Looking for a place to sit at one of the four sides of the stage, you notice that the dancers and performers are getting ready. Some of them run around or roll on the floor. Others are busy with all kinds of props. Pieces of rock, a green cord, even a disco ball. A musician is tuning his guitar at one end of the stage, and then walks towards a drum kit on a small platform in the middle of the largest tribune for the audience.

A woman is dressed and undressed by a stylist, while a photographer is taking pictures of every new, weird outfit. You notice a glittering curtain, racks with clothes, and see that some seats are covered by an inclining wooden installation, as a big slide. As you’re discovering all of that, you notice that the movie theme seems to be on repeat. Endlessly. And you realize that all these ’preparations’ actually make up the opening scene of this dance performance.

Sketches/Notebook was created during a residency at Hebbel Am Ufer theater in Berlin. ‘A recurrent interest in the works of choreographer Meg Stuart is the search for new presentation contexts by continuously reformulating interdisciplinary forms of cooperation’, it says on her website, and Sketches/Notebook is indeed proof of that, bringing together dancers, a visual artist, a musician and a costume designer in a performance resembling a giant sketchbook; a continuous succession of scenes, in which many elements get to play a role. Dance and movement. Music and speech. Light and colour. Form and texture. Clothes and objects. Energy. It’s just a question of the emphasis shifting.

In one scene the performers are waving their arms up and down in duo’s, in another they seem to form letters on the floor with their bodies, or they resemble animals adhering Madonna’s Vogue-commando: strike a pose! One scene you’re bound to remember is the one in which Meg Stuart is dressed with duvets and blankets and becomes a bag lady from outer space, with coloured tape on her face and glittering bracelets on her arms.

Another one is the one in which a group of dancers is crawling slowly as one organism over the floor, trying not to leave behind the stuff (clothes, a cowbell) other dancers have squeezed into the rugby scrum this scene started out from. Or the closing scene, in which they’re all experimenting with spotlights, means to reflect that light, and filters to change the colour (not forgetting to hand out sunglasses to members of the audience sitting nearby).

What is impressive is that although Sketches/Notebook is quite a long piece it never becomes a tedious one. Your patience is never tested, and the audience is also never harassed (which happens often during this kind of performances). You never feel shut out. And however loose and ‘sketchlike’ all of this may feel, you notice that attention has been paid to all sorts of little details.

I remember thinking, as I left the theater, how generous this performance was. As an extravagant party set up especially for you. And how, by the way it plays with all these different elements it becomes much more than a dance performance. (You feel the presence of a visual artist, but a very special mention has to go out to Berlin-based fashion/costume designer Claudia Hill who – with two strange earpieces with antennas seems to receive orders from extra terrestrials – is continually changing the costumes and thus the general look of this performance.)
In that way it resembles The fault lines, another but more modest collaboration with visual artist Vladimir Miller. But this time around it really becomes a multifaceted performance that one could easily picture being a part of an art exhibition. Sketches/Notebook fits as much within the walls of a contemporary art museum as it fits within the walls of a theater. Loved it

The American choreographer Meg Stuart appears to be breaking new ground with her new work Built to Last. Never before has she created a piece around existing music. This time everything revolves around monumental, classical compositions, created to stand the test of time, to defy the centuries. But if it’s in your blood, you can’t avoid it.

Four stars ****

Built to Last came about at the invitation of Johan Simons, the Münchner Kammerspiele’s current intendant. You can see this from the cast, which consists of performer Davis Freeman (Stuart’s brother) and dancers Anja Müller, Dragana Bulut and Maria Scaroni – all of whom were selected by Stuart herself. In addition, two of the Kammerspiele’s leading actors were also supposed to be taking part: Kristof Van Boven and Lena Lauzemis. Lauzemis dropped out due to injury, but Van Boven went on to carve out a place for himself, for all the world as if he’d spent his whole life dancing.

Half an hour before the end of this over two-hour long piece, it is Van Boven who expresses the concerns that go right to the heart of the performance. An essay about monumentalism by Bart Verschaffel inspired these. Humans, he claims, erect monuments to commemorate something or someone. As time passes, the first of these two meanings becomes irrevocably eroded. What is left is a stone object whose immovability makes it into a fixed point of reference in an ever-changing world. Monuments crystallise time: they are the diametric opposite of movement and life.

But is this also true of ‘monumental’ music? Music dramaturge Alain Franco has put together a collection of musical monuments. He begins with early music by Perotinus, then jumps to Beethoven’s Eroica and the late romanticism of Dvorák’s New World, finishing up with contemporary works such as Stockhausen’s Hymnen and Meredith Monk’s ‘Astronaut Anthem’. Rather than play the music in historical order, he uses it to create stark contrasts. At a certain moment, you might hear music designed to idealise something (Beethoven), only to find the following piece unravelling this idealising zeal (Stockhausen). It is an approach that results in an amazing musical rollercoaster and the meaning of the music becomes increasingly unsteady. Towards the end, recordings are also manipulated and stretched. The final composers, Gérard Grisey and Arnold Schoenberg, are thus barely recognisable.

Impulsive
The way the dancers use the music undermines the meaning within it even further. They go to every possible extreme by, for example, ‘supporting’ Dvorák’s ‘new world’ with tautly choreographed gestures that more closely resemble semaphore than dance. The dancers perform these movements whilst lying flat on their backs on the floor, which makes them seem even more absurd. The performers’ interpretation of the first movement of Beethoven’s third symphony could hardly be more different: they totally let rip to it. If it can be compared to anything, then perhaps it’s most like the impulsive reactions made by children to exciting, loud music. Neck-breaking turns and violent landings follow in quick succession. Somewhere amongst all this, there is also ‘proper dance’, such as Maria Scaroni’s bewitching interpretation of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio in A.

As if this clash between music, movement and text isn’t enough, scenographer Doris Dziersk throws a whole cartload of images on top of it. A bizarre, often stationary planetarium hanging over the stage, a digital screen the size of a man, weird masks, hilarious costumes, pointless props like a flail or a butterfly net, and even a life-size triplex model of a dinosaur. You can invent all manner of explanations for this, but none will hold up for long due to the unpredictable march of events. Everything keeps on moving, nothing crystallises.

As a result, Built to Last is extremely irritating at times, like a joke without a punch line, or a story leading nowhere. The long duration of the piece actually turns out to be an advantage in this case: the performers’ overwhelming drive gradually unleashes a feeling of liberation within you. It’s abundantly clear that the tale being told here isn’t an unambiguous one. You’ll never understand everything the performers want to tell you either about, or with the help of, the music. In this sense, the piece is a total ‘failure’. It is not a ‘monument’ that pins down a specific moment in time. But as a spectator, you also share this failure with the performers.

In the final analysis, Built to Last is about not being able to communicate, whilst continuing to try. In this, you suddenly recognise Meg Stuart’s hand.
“For me, movement expresses the longing to make contact, but movement also inherently expresses the failure of communication”, she comments in the programme. It is this that links Built to Last to earlier works like Forgeries, Blessed or Maybe Forever. But this performance simply propels you from one surprise to another.

Have you ever eaten a succulent Big Mac with Beethoven playing in the background? No? You should try it. Afterwards, go and see Meg Stuart’s Built to Last. You’ll feel perfectly at home.

In her new choreography, Meg Stuart, known as the madwoman of modern dance, confronts five performers with overwhelming compositions from the classical music repertoire. Works that are landmarks in musical history. A careful selection was made by the conductor and pianist Alain Franco, as musical dramaturge: think of Ligeti’s Lontano, Schönberg’s Der Kranke Mond or Meredith Monk’s Astronaut Anthem. These are scores that music lovers would normally approach with reverence. Scores that pretty much any artist would approach with reverence. Except for Meg Stuart.

Collapsible Dinosaur
You begin to suspect something from the moment you walk in: the decor of Built to Last is rather too reminiscent of a playground for adults to stay serious for a whole performance. There’s a giant, collapsible dinosaur in the right hand corner, nine floating balls like a modest solar system suspended in mid-air, and a mobile cabin in the left hand corner. What more does a performer need to keep himself amused?

Nevertheless, and with a degree of seriousness, Built to Last starts out with the intention of succeeding in its aim: to lay bare the human condition by means of a confrontation between the choreography and the music. The three women and two men tense their muscles with rapt concentration to the sounds of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen Region 2. They then hobble across the stage like glorified robots, or nervous creatures, their arms swinging mechanically alongside their bodies. When performer Davis Freeman lets out a brutal laugh, the mood turns positively creepy. You’d almost be happy not to be sitting in the front row. But five minutes later, it becomes apparent that the suspense won’t be sustained for too long. One symphony follows another, and while a gigantic orchestra has clearly succeeded in producing piece after piece of stunning music, very little harmony is evidenced between the five performers on stage. They stumble around to the music like characters in a silent film: wordlessly, with grotesque movements and magnified emotions. Beethoven must be turning in his grave. Until, with a click of his fingers, performer Kristof Van Boven pulls out the plug and, in a split second, exposes the construction of this madness. The performers fall still, wipe away their sweat and then, from a sitting position, swell up when the violins in the next composition announce themselves. From vulnerability to inviolability, in Built to Last it is a question of pressing the shuffle button.

Middle Finger
And it carries on like this for almost two hours: with each new composition, the five begin with renewed courage on their search for the human condition, and for the possible impact of the music on human thought. They try, fail, try again, fail again, and in trying, fail.

Meg Stuart fails splendidly as a choreographer, in the theatricality of the performers (Davis Freeman and Kristof Van Boven are heavenly), in the inventiveness of the search and, above all, in so deliciously countering the gravitas that has been heaped upon the scores over the years. Wearing masks and wigs, the dancers sing along to Perotin, skip around in the stinking fumes of a smoke machine to Schönberg’s Der kranke Mond, and control the universe to the strains of Ligeti’s Atmospheres (or actually just make sure that they don’t bang their heads on the planets whirling around them). The tension between the seriousness of what we hear and the light-footedness of what we see is unpretentiously disarming.

In Built to Last, Stuart lays bare the ultimate human condition: longing and powerlessness, ambition and ignorance, the grandeur of a concept and the humility of mankind. In short, the power of failure. It is rare to see someone succeed in failing as magnificently and entertainingly as Meg Stuart does in Built to Last.

Built to Last by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods. Seen at the Kaaitheater in Brussels.

The Play = Built to Last
Company = Damaged Goods
In one sentence = The essence of ‘being human’ is transformed here into a colourful dance parade beneath the Milky Way, with a truly exceptional end piece as the cherry on this classic cake.
High point = The beautiful closing image where the ‘Milky Way’ hanging above the stage is sublimely ‘multiplied’. This may sound cryptic, but it would be a sin to give any more away.
Score = three stars * * *

Can a brilliant actor also be a brilliant dancer? Yes. Kristof Van Boven proves it. Kristof who? Kristof Van Boven (b.1981) was one of the Ghent National Theatre’s star actors when it was under the leadership of Johan Simons. Simons’ departure for the Münchner Kammerspiele (in 2010) also meant the departure of Van Boven. He followed Simons to Munich, where he was a huge success, as evidenced by the many prizes for acting that he has since been awarded in Germany.

Van Boven acquits himself rather well in his guise as a dancer. Or rather: he dances the stars from the sky and in Built to Last, rather fittingly, he does this with scenery that resembles an abstract version of the Milky Way. It is thus immediately clear what Meg Stuart wants to do with this performance: to put a world on the stage. Not the world of our blue planet. Another world. A wonderful world - one in which classical music steers the emotions and movements of its inhabitants. That’s exactly the approach taken in this piece: ‘can you do more with classical music than respectfully create carefully-wrought steps?’

During the première in Munich, classical music lovers only just stopped short of crying blue murder (mainly because the music was so loud that it drowned out their cries). Which is to say: Stuart got up a few people’s noses and had the Münchner Kammerspiele’s rather traditional audience up in arms at first. It was only during its long run that Built to Last found its true audience – an audience that shares Meg Stuart’s enthusiasm for letting rip to the music of the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven, Sergei Rachmaninov, Antonin Dvorák, Arnold Schönberg and György Ligeti.

The performance is a relay of dance moves, constantly interrupted by short breaks. During one of these breaks, Van Boven addresses the audience: ‘It is love and enthusiasm that drive us’, which sounds like an apology for the rather odd piece – it looked like a kind of primal dance of the robots – that had just been danced. Stuart literally allows her dancers to explore every corner of the stage, but also allows them to evoke every possible nuance of dance: from robotic movements to intimacy, or skipping around in a cloud of smoke in a thoroughly romantic way whilst music by Arnold Schönberg pours from the speakers. Everything is possible. Everything is built up and then destroyed again. Built to Last. Doris Dziersks’ decor – which looks like a playground for adults – is an excellent tool for this.

As the slightly spun-out performance progresses, you become accustomed to Stuart’s absurd, associative fantasy. You wander through it like Alice in Wonderland. Along the way, the dancers – led by Kristof Van Boven – develop their own little personalities with their passions, longings, questions and doubts. The essence of ‘being human’ is transformed into a colourful dance parade beneath the Milky Way and a truly exceptional end piece is the cherry on this classic cake.

At the end of April, Meg Stuart’s new production Built to Last premiered in Munich. The piece is the first co-production between her Brussels-based dance company Damaged Goods and the Münchner Kammerspiele, led by Johan Simons since 2010-2011. This was also the first time that Meg Stuart had worked with existing classical music and with a musical dramaturge, Alain Franco. The piece was performed in early October at the Kaaitheater. Jeroen Versteele, the Kammerspiele’s dramaturge, shares his impression of the creative process.

During the first month, we’re mostly listening to music, discussing the concepts of ‘sainthood’ and ‘monumentality’ and improvising around these themes. Is it possible to design a monument both physically and emotionally? Alain Franco plays us even more famous musical pieces, taken from different eras and from a wide range of styles.

The atmosphere is tense, and rather sad: yesterday, actress Lena Lauzemis fell off a ladder, seriously injuring her knee. She’s sitting propped up against the dance studio wall, on the verge of tears, determinedly preparing the lines that she is about to deliver – sitting down – during the run-through.

1
‘Music is always travelling away from its point of origin towards its destination in the fleeting moment at which someone experiences it – be that during yesterday evening’s concert or during this morning’s solitary jog.’ In the introduction to his wonderful work The Rest is Noise. Listening to the Twentieth Century the American journalist Alex Ross reveals the connections between musical and social developments over the past century, and simultaneously explains how situation-specific, how subjective the physical experience of music actually is. ‘Since 1900, musical histories have often been presented as teleological stories, accounts with the narrator’s eye firmly trained on a final objective, which are full of great leaps forward and heroic fights with the narrow-minded bourgeoisie. (…) Whether the course of history actually has anything to do with music is the subject of fierce debate. (…) The meaning of music is vague, changeable and ultimately highly personal. But even though history cannot tell us with any certainty what music really means, music can tell us something about history.’
By coincidence, I came across a copy of Ross’ book a few days before I met Meg Stuart in Berlin to discuss Creation 2012 for the first time – it wasn’t until a year later that the working title would be changed to Built to Last. It’s March 2011. Quotes from the first few chapters of The Rest is Noise come to mind when Stuart explains that she doesn’t yet know anything about the new performance, except for the music, for which she has a suggestion to make. ‘I want to explore how I can react with my performers to an overwhelming, symphonic musical score,’ she says. ‘This is a very intuitive idea. I usually work with new compositions and live musicians. I have never worked before with existing, classical music. In September I’ll be organising a first, exploratory workshop with the performers, and if I see it’s not working, we’ll do something different.’
I can’t help noticing that Meg Stuart already seems to have made up her mind. She is struggling to put it into words, but her idea has depth. ‘In my experience, listening to one of Beethoven’s famous symphonies drains you of energy. When confronted with such a masterpiece, you feel powerless. If you try to relate to it, you soon find yourself in a zone of shame, of human failure. And that’s the zone where things can go wrong.’
Currently, Stuart is putting the finishing touches to VIOLET, a piece that is to be premiered in Essen in a few weeks’ time. ‘This performance will be an abstract trip, a kind of trance,’ she says of it. ‘A tunnel of intensity. Repetitive and totally without irony. Creation 2012 could be more about a kind of social consciousness. I want to highlight the confrontation with classical masterpieces. It’s all about vulnerability and modesty. And humour. Modern dancers and actors doing something to a Beethoven soundtrack: I reckon that could turn out to be very funny.’

2
May 2011, Munich. Meg Stuart and I are sitting in the canteen of the Münchner Kammerspiele, the theatre where Johan Simons works as intendant, and which will be co-producing Creation 2012 in collaboration with Damaged Goods. This will be this illustrious repertory theatre’s first ever dance production. It’s also a first for Meg Stuart: this is her first choreography in Bavaria. Stuart is well known in Berlin, Zurich and Vienna, but not yet in Munich. So to give her some exposure here, we’re performing Stuart’s Do Animals Cry, a performance from 2009. This is to be staged in the Spielhalle, where next year Creation 2012 will also be performed. The Münchner Kammerspiele is a city theatre with a repertoire system (every evening, a different piece is performed in the Schauspielhaus, taken from a pool of some twenty five in-house productions), but in the Spielhalle – a compact, flexible, ‘industrial’ hall for more experimental work – we have been using an ensuite system since the arrival of Johan Simons. Productions play here for two months, after which a new piece starts its run.
The dancers are warming up and Meg Stuart is telling me about hoarders, people who obsessively collect things. They try to get to grips with reality by incessantly collecting things: newspapers, plastic boxes, bicycle tyres, toys, electronic goods, frozen food, absurd archives, anything you can imagine. They can’t throw anything away, cling on to everything, and create an immense, cluttered, often dangerous chaos. Homer and Langley Collyer were famous hoarders, who in New York early in the previous century, created a gigantic collection space in their house, where they eventually died together. One of the brothers was buried beneath a heap of rubbish while trying to bring food to his other brother, who was blind and had become hemmed in between heaps of junk. The blind brother died of starvation days later.

3
A preparatory workshop in Berlin is coming to a close. It’s September 2011. Music dramaturge Alain Franco introduces his first contribution to the soundtrack: two movements from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, a pinnacle of classicism, better known as the Eroïca, ‘a piece in memory of a great man’. Beethoven, a passionate supporter of the French Revolution, dedicated his symphony to Napoleon, whom he likened to the demigod Prometheus. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor and began acting like a dictator, the disappointed composer added to his dedication the words that Napoleon ‘was, in the end, no more than a man like everyone else’, but in spite of this, his Eroïca still breathes the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The uncompromising idealism that resonates through this grand, sparkling, epic music is that of a bygone, more hopeful age. The dancers and actors lie on their backs and listen.
‘Beethoven is the pivotal figure in a historical fantasy in which contemporary listeners love to indulge’, Franco explains. ‘He represents the fantasy of classicism that merely represents established certainties, and conveys an unshakable belief in a future where boundaries will be challenged. He is the ultimate heir to the ‘classical’. On the other hand, Beethoven can be seen - and this is even more important - as the founder of musical philosophy, just as Hegel was the founder of historical philosophy. In this sense, it’s no surprise that I want to give his music a central role in the performance.’

4
After two months of rehearsals in Berlin, we’ll be spending the last four weeks in Munich. For Kristof Van Boven and Lena Lauzemis, actors at the Kammerspiele and ‘serving’ in a number of repertory performances, this means a lot of flying back and forth during this first rehearsal phase. Van Boven, especially, is regularly absent from rehearsals, which for Meg Stuart is far from ideal given her group-oriented way of working.
The first month mostly involves listening to music, as well as discussing the concepts of ‘sainthood’ and ‘monumentality’ and improvising around them. Is it possible to design a monument not only physically, but also emotionally? Alain Franco plays even more famous musical pieces taken from different eras and a wide range of styles. They all have one thing in common: they are pioneering works, cornerstones of art history. Early on, the decision is taken that the performance will begin with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1967 composition Hymnen, an electronic montage of some forty national anthems, interspersed with war and nature sound effects. Hard tones signal to the performers, who are standing stock still, to start making unpredictable hand and arm movements, prompting a new consciousness of space and location.
‘Stockhausen creates his first tension builder with the idea of Beethoven’s classical idealism,’ Franco explains. ‘He holds up a mirror to reality, by giving us the sounds of patriotic hymns in a context that could not be further removed from that of proud nationalism.’
A second tension builder is introduced not long after this, with the piece Thallein by Iannis Xenakis – who, just like Stockhausen, was scarred by the Second World War and was a co-founder of new musical notations and methods.
Franco: ‘Xenakis introduced stochastic music, which rests on formulas of playing theory and chance calculation. This demonstrates his blind faith in mathematical values as the foundation of art and communication. The laws of arithmetic ratios, stripped of values and ideology, as an answer to a world from which any sense of justice has been sucked away.’ We hear a grandiose example of Xenakis’ approach in Thallein, a naughty sounding composition that is both provocative and rhythmic.
While we are listening to this music, there’s a playful moment between the performers Davis Freeman and Kristof Van Boven: an improvisation lasting a matter of seconds where one appears to be pursuing the other. Meg Stuart notices the interaction and asks them to repeat it, only in a more exaggerated, expressionistic way. The other performers are asked to come up with variations on this hunting scene. This is the coincidental beginning of what will turn out to be a burlesque, impressive theatrical sequence.
‘We were just mucking around', Van Boven later tells me when he’s recalling how the scene came about. ‘We let the music tell us what we had to do. Really, every scene is a new attempt to maintain form. For her choreographies, Meg never allows us to draw on existing databanks of human movements and subsequent effect they have on the spectator. Every movement is created afresh, is always motivated by a sense of longing. The music is frequently bombastic, self-assured, rich in shading and detail. The way we handle our bodies in this piece should go just as far, should have an equally complex meaning. There is no direct, readable relationship between our movements and an emotional effect on the spectator. There is only the continual, searching attempt to try and give shape and to stand firm in the face of the music. Humans are not statues. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what this performance is about.’

5
All the rehearsals and the run-throughs of the scenes that had taken shape are videoed, and we watch them together afterwards. The video camera proves to be a particularly useful tool for the twenty-minute scene set to Beethoven’s Eroïca. The performers have agreed on some of the broad brushstrokes that they will be sketching out in the space as a group, but their personal courses are not fully defined. ‘Thanks to the recordings, we’re managing to get a feel for the way the group communicates as a whole,’ says Anja Müller, the German dancer who previously performed in Do Animals Cry. ‘During rehearsals, you always react very subjectively, precisely because there are no fixed rules. You have no choice but to react impulsively to the music and to respond to the energy of your co-performers.’
‘As if we are all playing together in an orchestra,’ that’s how the Italian dancer Maria F. Scaroni describes the feeling she had after the rehearsal. ‘If we were all to play in exactly the same key, the piece would have no visual appeal. It’s about developing the right level of individual tension and tuning it into that of your colleagues. The most important thing that Meg asked us to do at the start of the rehearsals was to move in “a state of listening”. We often perform exercises in what she describes as “tuning”: searching for a state of relaxed concentration, in which you can react freely and impulsively to external factors.’
The Eroïca is firmly fixed at the heart of the musical dramaturgy. But it’s not only Stockhausen’s critical, almost parodic Hymnen that acts as a contrast to the romantic ideal of Beethoven. Staub, by the famous German composer Helmut Lachenmann, two sections of which finally appear in the performance, was explicitly written as a commentary on Beethoven, albeit with references to his other world-famous symphony, the Ninth. Originally, Franco planned to position Staub in amongst the Eroïca, but during the rehearsals, he finds a better place for it: just before the Eroïca, during a Maria F. Scaroni solo that up to that point had always taken place in silence.
Scaroni: ‘We performed a “tuning” exercise to Stockhausen music and out of this I created a solo based on Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A. Rainer’s NO Manifesto is a plea for a non-virtuoso, unspectacular dance language: no to the heroic, no to style, no to eccentricity... I linked this philosophy to the playful, uncomplicated movements of a pedestrian on the street. During one of the run-throughs, the solo happened to take place during a long silence. I found this very beautiful and fitting. Silence allows us to listen to music. It was Alain’s idea to finally bring in Staub a the end of the silent solo.’

6
Lontano by György Ligeti, Vespers by Sergei Rachmaninov, Antonin DvoÃƒÂ…Ã‚Â™ák’s Ninth Symphony From the New World, Perotinus’ Sederunt Principes, ‘Der kranke Mond’ from Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire cycle, … Every one of these pieces, drawn from incredibly diverse periods, has its own distinctive ideology and is connected to new technological, and often also ideological, insights. For example, DvoÃƒÂ…Ã‚Â™ák’s piece was created during his first voyage to America, from where he wrote in 1893: ‘I am now convinced that this country’s future music must be built on what are known as nigger melodies. All the great musicians have borrowed heavily from the songs of ordinary people. Beethoven’s most appealing scherzo is based on what could currently be described as an expertly applied nigger melody. (…) In America’s nigger melodies I am discovering all that is needed for a great, noble musical tradition. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, brutal, lively, cheerful, whatever you like.’
Set to DvoÃƒÂ…Ã‚Â™ák’s heroic music, we create an insect-esque arm ballet that reminds me of a scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The four women lie in a row, heads towards the audience, and perform ever-faster variations on a small number of mechanical arm movements: impressive and enthralling.
‘A time machine’ is how Meg Stuart describes the soundtrack’s relationship to the performers. ‘You are going back and forth in time, discovering new worlds that you have to deal with time and time again.’
Dramaturge Bart Van den Eynde came across an extract from Slavoj ÃƒÂ…Ã‚Â½iÃƒÂ…Ã‚Â¾eks The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema on YouTube, in which the philosopher discusses the role of music in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator: ‘The same music that served evil purposes can be redeemed to serve the Good. Or it can be read in a much more ambiguous way. With music we cannot ever be sure. In so far as it externalizes our inner passion music is potentially always a threat.’

7
‘The rehearsal space itself gradually becomes a growing archive, in which we’re collecting information and fascinations, like hoarders,’ muses Maria F. Scaroni during the break. ‘Alain Franco’s speeches about his take on musical history, Schönberg’s atonal music, and Xenakis’ stochastic music are also part of the space. Just like the philosophical reflections on sainthood and monumentality, written by cultural philosopher Bart Verschaffel. It goes without saying that we would never base an improvisation on stochastic musical theory - input by Meg and by us is always emotional and impulsive - but still, the knowledge-laden atmosphere that permeates the rehearsals is incredibly important.’
‘We need this sort of shared thinking space,’ confirms Anja Müller. We all have totally different personal and artistic backgrounds. We share five different native languages. It has taken a long time for us to bond together as a group: each of us has our own aesthetic sense, our own expectations. Sometimes I need something that I don’t get; sometimes I get too much of something that I have no need of at all.’
Maria F. Scaroni: ‘During the rehearsal, one individual might sometimes have the desire to go deeper into something, but the collective task demands that we stay with the idea, follow the group dynamic.’
Anja Müller: ‘The result of this sort of process, involving international artists plucked from different contexts, is always going to be enormously enriching. Each one of us is continually questioning our self.’

8
After the application of a certain amount of pressure by Münchner Kammerspiele’s communication department, the white smoke finally appears - just in the nick of time for their monthly calendar print deadline: Creation 2012 is rechristened Built to Last. ‘Things are made with an inbuilt obsolescence,’ Meg Stuart explains in the bar after the rehearsal. ‘The title has a provocative edge. We always want to create new things. But at the same time everyone has the feeling that the end of the world is nigh, and everyone is secretly preparing for it. Sad, but true.’
A few days later we find ourselves in the bar again, chatting over a beer about a scene that we have altered quite dramatically today. ‘Rebuilt to last’, I say. ‘That’s even better!’ says Stuart. ‘Can we still change the title?’ But it’s too late: the monthly calendar is already at the printers.

9
24 March 2012, the Uferstudios in Berlin. Today is the last rehearsal day in the German capital; next week the team will be moving to Munich. Tonight there will be a run-through for friends and colleagues from the Damaged Goods network. The atmosphere is tense, and rather sad: yesterday, actress Lena Lauzemis fell off a ladder, seriously injuring her knee. She’s sitting propped up against the dance studio wall, on the verge of tears, determinedly preparing the lines that she is about to deliver – sitting down – during the run-through.
After the run-through, Lauzemis decides to throw in the towel. Her knee will require an operation, which will be followed by a long recovery period. If she is extremely careful, her doctor says that the operation could be delayed until after the premiere, but she doesn’t see the point. Dancing with extreme care…?

10
The first rehearsal day in Munich. We notice that without Lauzemis, the group scenes take on a totally different dynamic. The twenty-minute group scene on the Eroïca feels like a Christmas dinner with a family member missing. The scene with the arm ballet is quite simply missing an extra pair of arms: four pairs are visually so much stronger than three. While we are waiting for the decision about whether Lauzemis will be replaced, Davis Freeman lies down beside his female colleagues and starts practicing the arm movements. ‘You’ll have to shave your arms, Davis’, laughs Meg Stuart.

11
Lena Lauzemis will not be replaced. The performance will be completed with five performers. This is not the only change that is made shortly after our arrival in Munich. A gigantic screen, which was to be set up behind the stage and lit so that it constantly changed colour, is also sacrificed: scenographer Doris Dziersk finds the Spielhalle’s natural state much more beautiful, including the artillery of old-fashioned spotlights up against the back wall – ‘a graveyard of lights’, Meg Stuart confirms. The mobile, an abstract sort of planetarium hanging from the roof that rotates mechanically, works here for the first time, and inspires some spectacular looking improvisations. To Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, Anja Müller glides through the universe, striking leaders’ poses. Her statuesque poses are filled with a growing despair, because the turning planets sometimes launch treacherous attacks on her.
‘How powerful you are,’ reflects Stuart afterwards on stage. ‘Look how far you can go in the creation of your own reality.’
This makes me think of the hoarders that we haven’t spoken of in months but who, in their crazy attempt to order the world around them with their collections, still permeate the images we’re developing during rehearsals.

12
We’re watching video recordings, over and over again, of new versions in Munich and old versions in Berlin: the sequence set to Beethoven’s Eroïca is dissected, discussed and compared almost daily. Meg Stuart saves all the recordings on hard drives. She knows exactly who does what at every moment of every recording. She talks to the performers about the game that they are playing with one another in the scene, about constantly re-discovering the rules, about the state of destabilisation, about the physical reconstruction of a symphony and the shameful, unavoidable failure to do it. She talks about collective rituals, about het question of how a group can share an ideology and express it. She doesn’t want to see any fixed structures, tricks or ideas, but instead to see performers making conscious choices all the time. ‘Every moment you can step out.’ Every moment you can show your free will. Not psychology, just humanity.
‘Most of my pieces examine a specific state of consciousness,’ Stuart tells me later on. ‘But this piece is more about practicing different forms and situations. The meaning of many of the scenes is all in the shades of difference, in the small gestures and looks that infuse iconographic images and great announcements with humanity. That’s the crazy thing about dance: it is all about concrete shapes and movements and at the same time it allows you to communicate more deeply, to describe inter-human connections.’

13
‘Let’s just say that irony is going to be one of the key flavours of the performance,’ Maria F. Scaroni tells me after a rehearsal. ‘It is often rather tongue in cheek. The parodic nature of our movements is a consequence of the grandeur of the music and a certain emotional ignorance with which we approach it. The relationship between the musical material and us is out of kilter. As if you can rehearse every day with Beethoven, Bruckner and Rachmaninov and say to them “Hi, how’s it going today?” All you can do is to try and remain honest at all times, to accept your own imperfections and to behave modestly. We are dealing with masterpieces in a playful way. We are actually taking it very seriously. Just like children can sometimes play very seriously.’

14
A run-through, three days before the premiere. Johan Simons comes to take a look and is delighted with the closing image, which has been a subject of fierce debate in the last few days: ‘Beautiful. The players are holding the world in their hands, or that’s how it seems to me.’

15
The day before the premiere. Meg Stuart sees all her players as ‘performers’ but within the context of the Münchner Kammerspiele, the collaboration between dancers and actors is an important theme. ‘Actors normally need certain tools: text, a concrete situation, attributes… explains Kristof Van Boven. ‘For dancers, on the other hand, an empty space is a highly usable thing. They use other tentacles, create movements from different impulses. I also admire dancers’ ability to trust a good discovery, and not to then endlessly mess around with it, as actors are prone to do. The added value I can bring to the performance as an actor is my distaste for a ‘loaded atmosphere’. If a situation on stage becomes falsely sentimental, I try to do something to turn the space back into just a stage instead of a shrine.’

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And then: the premiere, the big eyes and careful words of the theatre staff; the storm of reviews and critiques in blogs, in newspapers and magazines; actors from the Kammerspiele who wish that more actors had taken part; actors who would have like to have been involved themselves; performances for forty people; performances for a full house of season-ticket holders with forty people walking out; the delighted reactions of people who love the idea that they can see something like this in Munich; audience members who call out to me in the street that the loud volume is a crime; the crowds who come to listen to the introduction that I give before each performance and the genuine interest I pick up on when I talk about Meg Stuart’s first production Disfigure Study in Leuven; Meg Stuart’s revitalising re-appearance in the middle of the run-through; her criticism of the way in which the ‘searching, buoyant shape of many of the scenes has been melted down into an all too well-aimed aesthetic’; Davis Freeman arguing in vain in the Theaterleitung for performances scheduled during FC Bayern München – Chelsea (Champions League final) and Germany – Portugal (deciding European Championship game) to be cancelled; our wounded pride when we played twice in a row for an audience of less than thirty; the sudden appearance of a surprising number of students from the music conservatory; the rapidly swelling audience numbers and the two last performances which, despite being on ‘open sale’ are almost completely sold out; frenzied applause with stamping in the aisles after the final performance. A real climax, just as the performance itself reaches its climax. For a moment, it feels as though the world is at out feet.

Built to Last has been performed from 4 to 6 October in Brussels (Kaaitheater), on 11 October in Leuven (Stadsschouwburg) and will be performed from 2 to 4 May in Antwerp (deSingel).

www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de
www.damagedgoods.be

The original Dutch version was commissioned by Etcetera and appeared in Etcetera 130 (Sept 2012).
Translation : Helen Simpson.

Dance choreographer Meg Stuart takes her audience on a demanding and powerful journey with new creation, VIOLET.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - Meg Stuart, born 1965 in New Orleans, Louisiana, is one of Europe’s most prominent dance choreographers. Her Brussels-based company, Damaged Goods, was founded in 1994 and has since supported the creation of over 20 evening-length works that have won her much international acclaim including the prestigious Bessie Award in 2008. Stuart’s work spans solo performance, large-scale installations, improvisation, and film—an expansive range for a single artist. If you enjoy artists with consistent style, then Meg Stuart’s rapidly evolving repertoire will likely be perplexing.

Indeed, Stuart seems intent on subverting her own habits and pushing her choreography to untested—perhaps uncomfortable—grounds. As a result, her work constantly reinvents itself and has avoided clear definition. Stuart’s movement research propels her dancers to explore the unknown—the naked essence or inner psychology of the body. Her most recent work, VIOLET, also creates an intense visceral experience for the viewer.

VIOLET begins with a flash of light jolting my senses into high alert. Five dancers in a straight line begin on a bare stage in utter stillness, leaving me searching for what movement will begin the piece. Bit by bit, a scan reveals a finger stirring or an elbow shifting. The five dancers, never in unison yet still in accordance, accelerate their pace so gradually that I hardly notice the slip into a frenzied universe of swinging arms, repetition over repetition, the sheer energetic charge mixing agony with bliss.
The dancing is coupled with urgent, pounding, and in fact deafening music, engineered with laptop and drum set by live musician Brendan Dougherty. As the electronic music expands and shapes the room with its droning pulse, I notice the audience moving uncomfortably—muscles involuntarily gripping and heaving. It becomes so intense that the sound of a dancer screaming at the top of her lungs is still obscured by the music. And then—a sudden stop. The five dancers, breathless, stand still at the edge of the stage and watch the audience. Staring back, I feel as if I had just come from a crowded, stuffy dance floor into a cool, muffled bathroom only to see my face silently reflected in the mirror.

At one point, a dreamy landscape punctuated by intense, rainbow lighting emerges. One dancer makes the first physical contact with another, and then all five are rolling as an enormous conjoined organism around the stage, limbs crossing and folding in undecipherable harmony.

This piece is not for the timid or sensitive. During the performance in Paris, six people left the show in the first twenty minutes—an act that only fueled my own desire to stay. Beware: the 80-minute show is literally exhausting to watch if you arrive in a state of tension. Like a drug trip, a magnification of your own state of mind is possible, since VIOLET plays with experience of the present moment. Though Stuart’s work tends to be challenging, there is something trancelike and quite unforgettable about the journey.

The man sits inside the dubious shelter of hit little cardboard shack, staring out at strangers. The strangers stare back. His body makes little twitches. The palm tree and giant swan, also cardboard, are slowly wilting, as his roof. It has been raining, and hard, for a long time now.

The man is Francisco Camacho, and his world is “Blessed” (and also, it seems, damned).
Created by Meg Stuart with Mr. Camacho and two ancillary performers, the 80-minute mostly solo work, from 2007, is being performed at New York Live Arts, where it had is North American premiere on Thursday.

Mr. Camacho is a compelling, enigmatic presence. Following him, we are plunged into a world at one particular and anonymous. The set (by Doris Dziersk). The downpour and a persistent, ominous sense that something is not right calls to mind the feel of Joan Didion’s novel “The Last Thing He Wanted”, which centers on an American woman embroiled in an international conspiracy on a beleaguered tropical island. “She liked the place empty,” Mr. Didion writes. “She liked the way the shutters had started losing their slats. She liked the low clouds, the glitter on the sea, the pervasive smell of mildew and bananas.”

In BLESSED the smell is wet cardboard. Soon enough, the set has all collapsed, leaving Mr. Camacho to seek shelter as best he can among the soggy, crumpled forms. The rain continues in bursts. Jan Maertens’s lighting offers hazy spotlights and harsh glares, or all but disappears to create a semi-gloom. Hahn Rowe’s spooky, electronic score, though more boilerplate than his typically distinctive compositions, sets a spooky, alienated mood.

Who and what is this man meant to be? His movement strange and stylized, shifts through varied registers. He walks in smooth, sliding steps, holding his body in semi-profile, like a figure from a frieze come almost to life. He bows down to the regally curving neck of the swan before it has sagged over, mimicking a ballet swan. Later he crawls in rapid, jerky trajectories, like a rodent seeking some morsel of sustenance.

Mr. Camacho’s watchers must ferret out their sustenance too. Ms. Stuart frequently plays with the oblique and the tedious, often with thoughtful results. But at a certain point on Thursday my experience shifted from feeling caught up within the poetic vagaries of a live work to constructing, from a remove, intellectual hypotheses about it.

The catalyst for this shift might have been Mr. Camacho’s donning a mask with read beard and multicolored afro (the costumes are by Jean-Paul Lespagnard) and morphing into a jokey, sinister figure with slinky, sexualized movements. Much later Kotomi Nishiwaki makes an appearance as a dancer from what might have been a Las Vegas casino routine, mugging it up and prancing about as Mr. Camacho sits amid the wet ruins, his mouth pulled into a terrible, teeth-baring grimace.

You could think of cultural imperialism and of natural disasters in countries where tourism rebounds ling before the victims do. (Mr. Camacho eventually gets his own dress-up moment, as Abrahan Hurtado puts a series of outlandish costumes on his frame, while Mr. Camacho stands with his arms outstretched, his eyes rolling back in his head like a cross between a mystic and an imbecile.)

But nothing matches the power of Mr. Camacho’s early stillness. As BLESSED grows more involved, its meaning seems increasingly imposed from without, and its internal mysteries dim.

Shellshocked, but extremely alive: five dancers in an abstract maelstrom that sweeps you away (Meg Stuart’s ‘VIOLET’)

Somebody was waving, as I was leaving the theatre. Waving goodbye to someone else. As I saw that stretched arm, up in the air, in the distance, I realized she had gotten to me. Once again. From now on every waving arm will probably make me think about VIOLET. For the first time in many years American choreographer Meg Stuart skips all narrative elements and crossbreedings: just five dancers and one musician on stage. For a trip you might or might not like, but one you’re not likely to forget. VIOLET premiered in Essen, earlier this month, and had its French premiere at the Festival d’Avignon.
A flash of light and there they are. Five dancers, standing just in front of a slightly curved black wall, facing the audience. At the left side of the empty stage: Brendan Dougherty, behind a laptop and a drum kit. Very slowly he rises the volume of his soundscape. And still those dancers aren’t moving. Or wait: did I just see one hand move a little bit? No. Yes. Yes I did. It looks as if these bodies are defrosting. An arm is raised. A head moves. A torso is turning slightly. But still those feet stay firmly rooted. Those legs aren’t moving. The movements become more intense. I think by myself: I’ve never known that the upper part of the body can do that many things, without having to involve the lower part.

By then the volume has become really loud. And this spaceship called VIOLET is taking off. I’m not a big fan of unnecessary decibels, as you might know by now, but this time around, I understand that a certain volume level is needed to make this trip a succesful one. And luckily enough, it never becomes really unbearable. It’s one long piece of electronic music necessary to create this feeling of a maelstrom. To create this feeling of a world outside the world as we know it. This strange universe where people aren’t moving as they should be moving, even though their movements are oh so familiar.

Bodies are bending, necks are twisting, shoulders are rotating, arms are waving, mouths are screaming. And those legs start moving to. Step by step those five dancers are moving forward. They use the rest of the space. But don’t expect them to run or to move those legs high up in the air. No: it’s as if they need to stay grounded, as in the aftermath of some nuclear disaster. Shell-shocked. This has nothing to do with moving gracefully or elegantly. But on the other hand: don’t think they’re just freaking out or improvising. You just feel that a lot of attention has been paid to all the different details. This is a tightly choreographed piece.

Don’t expect them to build a ‘classic’ group choreography either, to dance in unison. It appears as if these five people aren’t even aware of each other’s existence, but observe closely and you’ll see that certain elements are passed on. When they finally do come together, they form a beautiful ball of energy, rolling on a floor that has become an impressive rainbow.

I could tell you more, about what goes on in VIOLET, but let me stop here. Allow me just to predict that you too, you’ll be standing outside, after the performance, wondering what kind of trip you’ve just been on. VIOLET is probably the most abstract piece Meg Stuart has made in a long time. No acting, no video, no narrative elements. It means that this is a choreography that is moving forward, so to speak, along only one wavelength. (Don’t get me wrong. By that I don’t mean that it’s poor or too simple). Personally, I’m more fond of a more multi-faceted approach, as in Meg Stuart’s extraordinary Do Animals Cry or that melancholic Maybe Forever. But some will certainly fall for the radicalism of this impressive return to the world of pure movement.

In the tense breathless silence, the motionless restlessness at the beginning of the installative performance fault lines by Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher and Vladimir Miller, something is foreclosed and revoked at the same time – something that will have been. Fault lines: something will have happened, and the tectonic fissures between the bodies, between the media – reconstruct, remember it just because of their paradoxical emptiness. From the outset, a dispositive of the past shimmers through what could have been, will have been totally different. A scene under the banner of a farewell which will pass into the strangely melancholic restlessness of technical challenges – choreographical and medial ones. Neon lamps flash up, glittering, which paradoxically mark a kind of ramp for the white cube and simultaneously engulf the scene in laboratory light. No black box, an exhibition space as the location of this installative performance. A dance performance which turns into a kind of video installation that, however, happens frontally towards the audience. There is a curtain, too, yet it does not serve as a partition between stage and auditorium, but stretches along the one white wall of the stage area – a curtain behind which there is nothing. And nothing will stand behind the performative gestures either, they will stand for nothing – and disclose more and more nothingness, wistfully uninvolved.

We hear the room’s breathing, the whispering of Vincent Malstaf’s sound installation which will later turn into the stuttering acoustics of a film soundtrack. We see Gehmacher, Stuart and the video artist Miller (also on stage), far apart from each other at first. Abandoned. And exposed. Exposed, too, the projection equipment, the golden beamer, the golden cables. The tectonic fissures. Then, Stuart and Gehmacher will not fall into each other’s arms but rather attack each other, in a fighting embrace, violently, repeatedly, with absentminded resolve – and fleetingly, an undecidable tenderness, an inactive solicitousness will yet arise. Already under the banner of parting, on the verge of a farewell the performers, the man and the woman, will turn towards each other for evanescently brief moments only in order to immediately turn away again. The movements will pause in a still, in a picture, but not as a picture. Idiosyncratic. A thwarted expenditure which cannot be actualised in any act. A movement which would rather be none, which prefers not to. Rapt touches bordering on violence, fierce, unrestrained and at the same time casual, oblivious. Amnesia of gestures, contingency of touch.

Later, the two will remain on the floor for some time as if they were about to fall asleep, and Miller’s drawing directly on the projection area which shows a virtual double of the two bodies remaining in still will not wake them up, it just caresses their images. These drawings will not trace or continue the movements that took place, but rather continue to imagine dreamed touches. As if they were small whirlwinds and tongues of flame, proliferations in all the contingency of caresses or landscape structures, the drawings note down the fault lines of contact between chaotic structures, their contingent, maybe provisional and not retroactive traces – as a “memory of that which was not”. Stuart will briefly turn around on the floor, smile lopsidedly, tickled by the video artist’s pencil – not she herself but her image. Later Miller will leaf through the room slightly changing the projection’s position so that he virtually takes along the performers’ live body, turning it into two dimensions. The paradoxical, trembling flatness of the live bodies, that in the beginning seem to miss each other so intensively, is taken apart when they converge in reality, dissected more and more by the medial manipulation. The projections of the figures that are actually positioned near each other are separated virtually – as if the medial event were articulating something the live event is not able to formulate even if it could only happen ‘live’.
It takes place when it doesn’t. Like touch. Between the bodies, between the bodies and their images, between the singular body surfaces and their plural projection areas. In Être singulier pluriel, Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “The law of touching is separation, and even more, it is the heterogeneity of the surfaces touching each other […] insofar as the actual power of a body consists of its capacity of touching another body (or touching itself), which is nothing else but its de-finition as a body.” Thus Miller’s medial de-finition, definalisation of the bodies, his articulation, his medial touch with the live event – especially in the heterogeneity of this contact of different presentation and projection areas – will not be illustrative but strikingly illusive, in all its openness and its apparentness of illusion, which exposes itself to its own techné and thus, in a literally potential manner, turns relity into possibility. Literally exposed illusion made visible and in spite of this – or rather, just because of it – magical. The video artist who performs his apparatus on stage becomes part of it. The exposed path of the images and electronic impulses through the golden cables will paradoxically oscillate between illusion and disillusion, simultaneously present and absent, visibly illusive: real virtuality instead of virtual reality. The whir of projections will make the projected live bodies (and not only their projections) tremble. This is comparable – if in a different way – to Stuart’s Alibi and Visitors Only (2003).

A brief reminder, something like fault lines between works: Stuart’s Visitors Only begins with the vibration of the bodies with which her previous work Alibi ended. This time there are bodies clothed in transparent raincoats whose long trembling unsettles the scene’s visibility. Like trickling, vibrating raindrops the bodies in transparent coats fold the transparency of sight. The virtual veil of rain translates the scenic air into another state of aggregation. Intension instead of intention. The trembling choreography makes the room vibrate and fold: real movement that, however, virtualises real space. And when at the end of the scene the vibrating bodies jump on the spot now and then, as spring-back ball-point cartridges, it is as if the gestural tension of the sequence were critically whipping the writing utensils out of the hands of the choreography.

In fault lines, too, there is critical optioning instead of clinical representation; here, too – even if with an entirely different medial implementation, we witness a kind of virtual rainbow after the virtual veil of rain – a choreography in italics instead of boldface – as if it were only quoting the dancing body whose outline resists any presence like bristling skin, like goose bumps, as if the bodies were merely trembling quotes of themselves, put between quotation marks, as if they were not there at all. This is the strong mutual affinity between the choreographies by Stuart and Gehmacher, the author of in the absence (2003), Mountains are Mountains (2003), incubator (2004), like there’s no tomorrow (2007), to name but a few of his works. What do the choreographies of two of the most interesting protagonists of contemporary dance try to present so passionately, long after having conceptually committed themselves to the un-presentability of passions? What shakes the bodies on stage, what makes them tremble like this – searching for an Alibi for their own movement, their own being moved, for grasping their own emotion? What may still touch them when every kind of solid ground withdraws from under their feet as if they were floating – like at the end of Visitors only – over an abyss? As a place of medial ascriptions, the motivation of touching becomes increasingly harder in contemporary dance and performance practice, and it is all the more interested in the emotive fall of the body which keeps evading the idea of its dancing weightlessness, even lightheartedness. As if this practice were asking again and again where the customary oppositions of conceptual/emotional, minimalistical/affective come from, by letting these oppositions fall. Instead of rehabilitating affects or opposing emotions to concepts, it tries to dis- and reassemble the ever emotive texture of choreography especially in the course of minimalism. It tries to defigurate the illegible figurations of feeling, to deconstruct its all too blind constructions – and to persevere, knowing about its referential imponderability.

The question of the potential of touch also deals with the main rule of the scenic – visibility. This investigation of the preconditions of a medium also has to be seen politically – i.e. against the ideology of sentiment, against the slogans of a positivistic view that postulates the evidence of visibility. The scenic emotion, however, stays in the trembling, the oscillation of potentialities – it is thus never actual, never present, but potential, in marked absence. “There is no falling in love, no falling out of love”, it says in Meg Stuart’s and Benoît Lachambre’s Forgeries, love and other matters (2004). The fault lines of lacking, failing, falling: falling in love, falling out of love. “There is no dance in this place, there is no reason to stay in this place”, it says in Forgeries, love and other matters. And yet the piece closes with the words: “I’m staying here forever.”

Maybe forever is the name of Stuart’s and Gehmacher’s first joint performance created in 2007 which they continued in 2010 with fault lines – to draw further confused fault lines and lines of distortion, of touching the other, prone to fault and missing, measuring, impudent, missed. Joint artistic research, too, between the video artist Miller and the choreographer Gehmacher: in the choreographic video installations dead reckoning (2009), at arm’s length (2010) and the group piece in their name (2010). Here, too, choreography and video installation, body and images go along with each other – toppling and diving into each other, immersing and submerging. What seems to separate not only the live figures but also the various projection areas actually connects them – if they are to be connected at all. Bodies and their stories, put down by themselves but not anywhere else either, that linger at the fringe of their mirror-image without breaking the glass. “One reaches a border not by crossing it but by touching it”, Nancy writes in Corpus.

Fault lines: bodies that touch the border between each other without crossing it – that are, in fact, this border. Exposed bodies, exposed to touch, in all their immeasurability, incalculability – and vulnerability. As if they were phantom pain, a painful nothingness, completely exposed to the other. Touching each other as attention and distance. For it is necessary “to interrupt the immediacy and continuity of touch”, says Jacques Derrida in Le toucher: Jean Luc Nancy. It is this chance of possible interruption, of interrupted immediacy in all the anchorless melancholy of every gesture in fault lines that endows the scene with the optics of the optional, of openness. The camera makes the eye alert for the live event, the invisible distances within the live touches. Doubles, reflections, surfaces, layers. Bodies disrobed by themselves, bodies on withdrawal, which are, at the same time, quoting themselves, setting themselves in italics, every gesture resisting itself – and merging into the pixel-like goose bumps of Miller’s projections. Medial replays that only play the live bodies back into their real virtuality. Stills that always assert the choreographical and medial movement. What remains is the never-shown, the performative residue of absence, the performative and medial gesture of the undeliverable. Gestures that are too big and too small at the same time, marking the rest of the inexpressible and only articulating with restraint – if at all.

The reserved manner of pathos and melancholy, so typical of Gehmacher’s choreography, here deals with the incommensurability of the other with the utmost aesthetic strictness. The too much/too little of scenic gestures as a residue. The rest is silence. And the melancholic absentmindedness of these gestures that evoke the exceptional circumstances of dance, ecstatically immobile or stutteringly bespoken, existential and exhaustive. Gestures so small that they touch their absence, as if they were not even there yet. Gestures so big that they tear apart. Fault lines. The bodies of Stuart and Gehmacher will leave each other and themselves – while touching. What will remain will be their outlines. Even after the two fighting/embracing bodies separate, one of them will stay in the interrupted gesture of touch. An embrace with empty hands. And Stuart will not so much caress her partner but rather retrace the contours of his body – a line along his body, almost as if tenderly outlining a dead body on the crime scene. Nor is this gesture accidental in Maybe forever. Choreography as an epitaph, as touching the ephemeral. At some point in the fault lines HE will push her ‘corpse’, her unmoving body along in front of himself. And again SHE will caress his outlines, touch her border to him, cut out not so much the body but the touch. The peephole projection, too, with which Miller will softly spy on and sample the two bodies, inert again – entirely different, cuts out the live bodies or rather the distance of their touches in order to focus on them: however, as punctum, as a crossfade of something invisible, in the sense of Roland Barthes’ punctum of photography, the incalculably interrupting and simultaneously painful punctuation of the ephemeral that records the literal withdrawal of the figurative, as a kind of blind spot in the eye of the hurricane. In “Les morts de Roland Barthes”, on the other hand, Derrida, on the occasion of Barthes’ death, specifies the punctum of transience as “incompleteness made visible”, as “punctuated yet open interruption”.

Interruption once again, narrative spots instead of narrative plots: the peephole of projection, its spotlights virtually punctuating the live event. The virtual touch of reality punctuates, isolates, focuses, interrupts, hurts it. It, too, is a touch in the mode of I prefer not to. Like the performative violence in the beginning, when the two performers touch each other to become separated – along their opposing fault lines. When they attack each other in order to then let go of each other, to desist; when they go towards each other in order to part. Bodies parting. They turn towards each other only to turn away from each other. The live touch raves, goes up the wall, is played against the wall, in the beginning a brutal and painful touch of the two bodies literally throwing themselves at the wall, letting their embrace fail intensively – and later also cast their projection on the wall, the projection that vibratingly repaints the live figures. The foil which Vladimir puts in front of the projector like a curtain makes the projected bodies shimmer and lets them immerse in virtuality. The rainbow of movements passing into each other is virtually doubled by the lyrical rainbow of glittering colours Miller will cast on the wall. Like a “drop of sky” (Friederike Mayröcker), the touch will camber down to the other – without actually touching. And always, shortly before the bodies raving with and at each other throw themselves against the wall, his body will cushion her body’s blow. He will protect her. Too much? Lyrical film soundtrack. The performance’s making of by Miller. And time and again one will come to lie in the other’s arms. Untouched.

Near the end Gehmacher and Stuart will sit on the floor together in front of the curtain and the white wall behind which there is nothing, and draw big circles around themselves with their arms. Two embraces without object, drawn embraces, two circles intersecting. The empty intersection of an embrace. The arms are folded, but in the frontal drawing of an embrace that never happened. An entanglement of two semaphores, two clockworks ticking peculiarly instead of signalling. Miller will pull the glittering foil over the images’ projection, let the figures glimmer pixel-like, thereby transporting them somewhere else entirely, uncannily enlarging the pointillist distance between them. And once again he will virtually isolate only Stuart’s projection which now – depixelated – will seem to inhabit a parallel world. The interrupting, painful, invisible punctum of touch in the image of the finale, the parallel worlds of touch will pause – in a downright transcendental longing for each other. Meanwhile, Gehmacher will have quoted his long arms, his self-referential gesture of a singular absentee’s outward tension.
In the choreography – as a punctual temporisation and spatialisation of touches – rather the untouchable is inscribed. The untouchable in figures of touching, figures without shape. Choreography as a technique of borders. And the borders as the figures of touching. Where the choreography splits the scenic bodies and glances with its sense of rhythm and touch, no body and no gaze will have stayed intact. In the fissure of this impaired and longing seeing and feeling, optic and haptic contact with each other, contaminate without ever becoming one. The ‘touchingness’ of a scenic touch will have been its potential, its strong weakness of touching without touch; without transgressing any limits, without mingling surfaces, but rather touching the borders, affecting, tangential, contingent: in all the contingency of a contact that occurs, happens, is imparted – only in separation, only in the non-intactness of tactile experience which does not concern unimpaired subjects, which takes no immediacy as given, which aesthetically, ethically, politically opens and closes the quotation marks for “touching” – as if they were the eyelashes of an ever distant, interrupted gaze. No immediacy, uninterruptedness, continuity, symmetry. The technique of touching rather concerns the caesuras, the syncopes, the fault lines. As if our world were built on fault lines, on those subterranean fissures and crevices in deep rock strata that are supposed to be responsible for our aggressions and depressions, for our violent stills and tender distances. Fault lines – perhaps those fissures, disturbance areas, lines of distortion at which we always abide, anchorless and restrained, in our mutual inverse desires, the lines at which – only in our inconsistency, our brokenness – we can touch each other.

The fault lines premiered at Utrecht Springdance Festival 2010 two hours before its official opening. A perspicacious move, given that in the field of contemporary dance, the makers belong to the vanguard. The question circulated whether this laboratory project should have ventured to the stage at all. My answer is yes, precisely because the performance can be read as a search for a renewed relationship between audience and performance. The latter is the more interesting because a central theme in the choreographic language of both Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher is the near impossibility of human relationships.

The fault lines germinated about two years ago in Vienna, where Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher were in a research project on image, projection and corpor(e)ality together with video-artist Vladimir Miller. Their entourage considered the result sufficiently successful to bring it onto the stage as an ‘installation-performance’. That generic name is enlightening too because as far as installations go, one can safely assume a degree of activation on the audience’s side.

In Huis a/d Werf in Utrecht, the stage of is bordered with stretches of neon-light. Gehmacher and Stuart are each neutrally waiting against a wall of the stage’s space. Vladimir Miller is squatting in front of what looks like a technical battery of camera and projector, his back turned to the audience. One could state at this point already that his gaze is turned in the same direction as that of the public. To the left a curtain is hanging down from the ceiling, the kind you may find in a traditional photographer’s studio. Here it is fitted within the focus range of Miller’s camera. Somewhere there is the purring sound of a 16mm film spool. In the middle of the stage a miniature screen is set up, hardly visible from the front row of the audience space. A second screen, the size of a torso, is equally difficult to watch as it is attached at an awkward corner to the right side wall of the stage. (Later on the back wall will serve to reveal images too). For a short while it looks as if the credibility of the set-up will be at risk. But then the performance finds its rhythm in an impossible encounter of the two dancers. Without ever looking at each other they keep on bumping into each other in all kinds of pitches and tones. Aggressive, desperate or unyielding, they stubbornly keep trying to pin each other down in an endless variety of armlocks. And, true to their creed, they never get to know each other: with his hands Gehmacher draws the outline of Stuart’s body without touching her and empty-armed puts her silhouette down elsewhere in the space, out of reach of the camera’s eye.

Audience-oriented

Admittedly at first sight the fault lines looks less digestible than the official opener of the festival later on the same evening, the re-enactment of Live, the first-ever Dutch video-ballet from 1979 by choreographer Hans van Manen. Though van Manen also works with two dancers, a camera and projection there is a world of difference between the two performances. Of course the premises of contemporary dance are different from those in ballet, a continual questioning of movement as an artistic practice on an axe running from standstill to extreme virtuosity.

The movement language of Philipp Gehmacher bears no reference to any existing dance vocabulary. His stumbling, blind, introverted idiom is highly idiosyncratic, recognizable only if you have seen him in previous performances, or in Maybe Forever, an earlier cooperation with Meg Stuart. She, for that matter, is surprisingly compliant in going along with Gehmacher’s language in the fault lines.

Apart from the dance language being less legible, the task division in the fault lines also is far less self-evident than in Live. Whereas in Live the cameraman stays closely at heel to the choreographer’s needs, the fault lines sees video-artist Vladimir Miller and his camera calling the shots. The camera is in a fixed central position : it doesn’t follow the performers but registers their movement only when their skirmishes bring them right in front. The result of these recordings is in Miller’s hands: the live-stream images are edited and shown on either one of the three screens if, where and when he sees fit.
Moreover, Miller’s new perspectives on the performers’ hopeless obstinacy gradually starts to influence their actions. While releasing their images on screen, he also sets them free: the performers quieten down up to the point where a hint of tenderness infiltrates their contacts. At one point they sit down next to each other in front of the camera to watch their images on the big screen, and, even if in reality one performer’s arm does not physically touch the other’s, on screen it looks as if they are intertwined.

With his gauging frames Miller not only opens up their potential range of action but also the time space. His perspective disengages itself from the performer’s reality and tilts them into a different time/space atmosphere, into a personal or collective subconscious that encloses underlying motives for the two performers’ moves. The unveiled images on the screens serve as tools that provide the performers with new insights they don't have to search for in vain in each other anymore.
The soundscape by Vincent Malstaf underscores old and hidden energies. There is the faraway sound of a barking dog, high-pitched children’s voices or the peeping of a swing.

In the slow revealing of the images on screen, Miller shows his métier. The techniques he uses are refreshingly down-to-earth. At one point he cuts a hole in a black sheet of paper and holds it in front of a projector. By slowly bringing the paper closer to the lens, a miniscule roundel of meaningless projection on the back wall is gradually extended into an overblown image of the performers. A little later, Miller adds a nimble spectre of colours at the bottom of the image by using coloured mica paper in front of the same projector. With this simple intervention Miller creates a sophisticated metonym for new spectra. Very deft also how at the end of the performance he brings the performers back to the here and now by drawing on their projected image a curly landscape, finishing up with bold, straight lines, as many options for new directions.

This new orientation also applies to the viewer. Thirty years after Live, the stage’s perspective has moved from Euclidean, over fragmented, to new focal points. The fault lines digs for new energies between disciplines and frames, not in the least between the performance and the individual viewer. Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher dish up new proposals of activation via Miller’s interventions: away from wrestling misunderstanding (as between the performers ) or passive watching (the fixed camera or consumerist viewing). We are invited by Miller’s example to reel in the what we see on stage in order to reshape it into a richer reality. From that point of view the fault lines can be read as an activator for a vision on art as a generator of concepts. Well, let’s just drop the issue of concepts. Art as a generator, tout court. In that sense the fault lines is fit for any stage.

A woman is watching a man. He looks up to her, into the camera. Starts to get up from his chair. “Don't get up!” she directs him gently but decidedly. And he, whom we only see via video projects, remains sitting. Waiting for directions, stretching his legs, his whole body towards the floor, testing his leeway. The intimacy of his room gets broken again and again by the voice of Meg Stuart, who sits mirroring him in a chair in front of the screen, watching: “Please get in the right position. That's better.” But the regime of observation is thwarted by time – it is simply impossible for Rachid Ouramdane to react to Stuart, as the scenery wants to make us believe: He is not in her power. At least not in the way the solo “Private Room” maintains –a paradoxical play between the Here and Now and the pre-produced video which unhinges causalities. An impossible negotiation of the togetherness that has always taken place, of the conditions, which comprises the artistic rehearsal processes as playfully as it does daily life. Who governs whom? Which tacit agreement is there, which consensus, which pact? From where does Ouramdanes gaze into the camera cross us – the camera which not only becomes Meg Stuart’s eye but also that of the audience? The relations are immediately broken – including that with the audience as the second observer in the picture who is continuously thrown back onto these breaks.

A little later Tim Etchells, author, performer and director of the British performance group Forced Entertainment, will bring Hollywood stars into impossible situations. “Sylvester Stalone and Bruce Willis sharing a shower” he announces in his solo “Starfucker” standing next to a red bar stool, and: “Tom Hanks at the dentist.” He sends John Wayne to heaven, Cary Grant to hell. In a total of five solos which the two magnificent artists play after each other, they subvert and perforate medial surfaces and open up imaginary playgrounds in the abyss between reality and fiction. They tacitly break codes, putting up for discussion the ways of representation by telling tales touching the borders of cliché – of filial love (“Downtime” / Etchells) and love relationships (“I'm all yours” / Stuart), constantly oscillating between an impossible proximity, its presentation and its failure. Both artists’ works shimmer between acting and acting-as-if, between observation and revelation, divulgement and seduction. Double bottoms are lavishly isntalled in the five solos which Stuart and Etchells showed on occasion of the book presentation of “Are we here yet?” at PACT Zollverein in Essen, a publication about the opus of the company Damaged Goods and Meg Stuart, edited by Jeroen Peeters.

The reader is made an accomplice

For five years the Belgian dance critic, dramatic adviser and curator has accompanied Meg Stuart’s work and talked with many of her collaborators over 24 years of artistic work and 16 years with her company Damaged Goods – among them Tim Etchells, the dancer and choreographer Benoît Lachambre, the light designer Jan Maertens, the visual artist Doris Dziersk, the dancer Varinia Canto Vila, the composer Hahn Rowe, the director Stefan Pucher, the dramatic adviser and author André Lepecki as well as the set designer Anna Viebrock. The book focuses on the artistic process, as the title already hints at – a citation from “Forgeries, love and other matters”. It does not want to proclaim ultimate truths but formulate a state of work – and thus approaches to working methods. The numerous professions depicted also make it clear how interdisciplinary Stuart works, how much the visual arts, video and music influence her work.
Many of the texts are by Stuart herself, apart from excerpts from performance texts. On the title photo, a film still from “Somewhere in between” (2004), Meg Stuart turns her back on the reader between the shelves of the fund in Zurich. But even on the first cover page her murmuring voice accosts him: “It is time to act. Forget the pain. Shake vigorously. Rehearse love. Make the first move.” Thus the reader is immediately made an accomplice, a co-actor in this strangely and excitingly in-the-face book: “Enjoy your stay.” There is no list of contents, no overview, nowhere. The book is not intended to be a scientific or journalistic analysis, no classification of the artistic works according to their social or cultural context. Rather, it focuses on the artistic process; it is a many-voiced, heterogeneous notation of its development – and that is what makes “Are we here yet?” equally special and intriguing among comparable publications. In numerous citations, essays, fragments, sketches and photographies the book etches out text and material strata through which the reader may stroll at will, and settle down here or there for a while.

Its narrative is especially emphatic with regard to collaborative processes, the approximations and gaugings of the artists who had a decisive hand in the aesthetics of Damaged Goods. Andrè Lepecki, who worked with Stuart as set designer and dramatic adviser, in “Dramaturging. A quasi-objective gaze on anti-memory (1992–98)” even calls collaboration a method which entirely keeps to the common present – “the collaborative ‘method’ […] had to be absolutely contextual, site-, piece- and sometimes even section-specific.” Lepecki describes in detail how he himself struggled for his place as a collaborator, for definition and action spaces, for serving Meg Stuart’s realm of ideas and at the same time adding something to it. For the collaborators’ functions are open, as the author and curator Myriam Van Imschoot describes by way of “On the table!” (2005–09), where she took part as artistic collaborator, dramatic adviser and performer, and in each of these functions took up another viewpoint of the production.

A view from inside into the innermost

The discussion of different points of view requires flexibility and curiosity, the hardly frictionless questioning or shifting of one’s own premises which extends far into stage language. Stuart herself in her text “Meeting foreign languages” reports that she always has forced the involvement with artists of other disciplines in order to break her usual working methods and not only meet the others work but the others themselves. Collaborations thus require abandonment of the familiar to work out new starting points together, as she describes by example of “Insert Skin # 1” (1996) and her work with the composer Vincent Malstaf: “Through Vincent’s presence, transferring processes from another field into the dance was also extended to music and sound.” Musical principles made her try how to translate them into her corporeality: “How can I sample or remix fragments of my movements, states, or elements of my daily life in my body?”

Lack and desire, the play with visibility and the axes of invisibility, and the discourse on the representation of bodies strongly influence her pieces. How the “displayced bodies” came to pass whose limbs are so at odds with each other, is described in several places in the book – possible best in that part which Peeters calls its core piece in his introduction: the exercises from Stuart’s workshops, in which her body language becomes dense and precise instructions which also invite the reader to go to the dance studio, work with the exercises and “let the tasks slowly overwhelm your body”, as Peeters writes.

Not last, “Are we here yet?” is an archive, a fund and a memorabilium which catches up with and overtakes the fleetingness of dance, overwriting and inscribing it. E.g., in the fragmentary, subjective catalogue of pieces, in which Stuart has written a brief text on each of her choreographies, memories and anecdotes which rarely recur to the pieces’ content or present declarations of intent, but create a striking, nearly haptic intimacy – when she recounts how Francisco Camacho, Carlotta Lagido and herself shaved their heads before the premiere of “Disfigure Study” (1991): “An androgynous and vulnerable art package waiting to be picked up.” This book is a view from inside into the innermost. It is a picking field, a rich and idiosyncratic compendium which presents an opening-up and a divulgement equally radical as her stage works: it does not close its covers of the opus of Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods but lets differences persist, casts trails, awakens curiosity and provokes openness.

For more than twenty years now, it has been impossible to imagine the international dance scene without American dancer and choreographer Meg Stuart. A manual about the artist, who lives in Brussels and Berlin, has now been published.

Her pieces have been fascinating audiences and critics alike. But what do members of the audience know about how a piece is created or about Meg Stuart’s way of working? Usually very little. While academic publications attempt to analyse her pieces primarily from the perspective of their reception, Belgian writer, dramaturg and curator Jeroen Peeters takes the opposite approach. In his book Are we here yet?, co-edited with Meg Stuart, he asks about the conditions of aesthetic production that lead to the creation of the work of this exceptional dancer and choreographer, who was born in New Orleans in 1965.

Peeters, who has known Meg Stuart’s work since the 1990s and who also cooperated as a dramaturg on Stuart’s major project Replacement at the Berlin Volksbühne in 2005, has compressed 50 hours of recorded interviews into texts of various lengths which highlight Meg Stuart’s creative processes. It is first and foremost Meg Stuart herself who speaks, and she has rarely given such clear information about her work as she does here. But many of her artistic companions also report on their experience of collaboration and describe Stuart’s working methods. The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of Meg Stuart’s creative work. As one reads it, the perspective is continually new and different, keeping our view of the working processes, decisions and pieces in constant motion. The fragmented, searching quality characteristic of all Meg Stuart’s works is also a feature of the book’s structure. Following the logic of fragmentation, Are we here yet? is not divided into capitals. The themes of the texts are merely grouped loosely around particular pieces or keywords, such as dramaturgy. The book is richly illustrated (graphic design: Kim Beirnaerts) and includes sketches and material from the archive of her group Damaged Goods, making it a kind of report on work in progress and providing an excellent insight into Meg Stuart’s artistic universe.

Transformation

“From distortion to transformation” is how Meg Stuart describes the development of her thinking about the body. In her first full-length piece Disfigure Study, the young American dancer and choreographer created a stir in the European dance scene back in 1991. Twisted bodies dismembered by the hard cuts in stage lighting were to be seen, a silent dance of twitching bodies, as in later pieces such as No One is Watching and Splayed Mind Out, which also electrified the audience. Since the turn of the millennium, her works have become increasingly theatrical. Like theatre pieces, they also draw on language and on the visually powerful stages of Anna Viebrock, Barbara Ehnes and visual artist Doris Dziersk, in which the dancers are constantly changing their identity. In contrast to the dance theatre of a choreographer such as Pina Bausch, however, Meg Stuart has never been interested in her characters’ psychology in this process. Stuart remains a bodyworker who tries to read her characters’ memories, suppressions and injuries from their physical states. In her work, social developments are not reflected in human interaction or failed communication, but in the flesh of the bodies themselves. In Meg Stuart’s works, even the apparently most abstract gestures and postures have a story to tell, says Austrian dancer and choreographer Philipp Gehmacher, Stuart’s partner in her piece Maybe Forever, in the book.

Crossing frontiers: Meg Stuart’s method

Jeroen Peeters attempts to go some way towards explaining why that might be the case. His book goes along with the secret theory that in spite of all the pieces’ diversity, there is something resembling a consistent method underlying Meg Stuart’s unmistakable style. Thus, a list and description of many improvisation exercises that serve the choreographer as the starting point of her research form the heart of the book. In them, she makes repeated attempts to put her dancers into physical states that take them to the frontiers of what is conceivable and achievable, as in the exercise “Looking at your own body as if it were dead”. In asking them to do impossible things, they are forced to work with resistance, and this resistance creates tension. It is in precisely this calculated failure and overtaxing that something unexpectedly new and personal is created, leaving behind the safety zones of conventional dance idioms. Often, the idea is to withdraw from one’s own body after an extremely emotional situation, to view oneself like an object, become a ghost and give oneself up to the environment like a medium. Her dancers’ incredibly strong stage presence results from their absence in their own bodies. Through making her dancers strangers to themselves, Meg Stuart dramatises their bodies, and they are constantly exposed to the view of one another and the audience. Every little movement is a manifestation of this desire for contact and recognition. Thus, the body becomes a gateway for existential orientation within society, which is often registered only unconsciously in everyday life.

Improvisations such as Auf den Tisch! (2005–2009) and Crash Landing, which was staged at five different venues between 1996 and 1999, clearly show that Meg Stuart has never shunned risk. Artists of all genres, including many of Meg Stuart’s dancer colleagues who have had a major impact on the European dance scene over the last 15 years, were invited to take part in this open-ended experiment. It becomes clear that Are we here yet? is not only a beautiful documentation of Meg Stuart’s work, but also a contemporary document about what has influenced dance in many parts of Europe.

Dr Gerald Siegmund is Professor of Dance Studies at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen. He specialises in choreography and performance.

‘Here we go’, the guy next to me sighed, as the lights went out. ‘Yeah, with her you never know what to expect’, his friend answered, just before the Paris’ premiere of Meg Stuart’s Do Animals Cry. It was meant to be a joke. They were most certainly referring to a performance of the American choreographer that had tried their patience. But it made me think: isn’t that a really enviable position to be in, as an artist?

Looking at a Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods-performance often feels to me like being dropped on another planet. Humans are living there too, and their behaviour resembles ours. But their life is a warped, surreal and in a strange way a much more essential version of ours.

When the lights go up on Do Animals Cry, you see a big tunnel made of wooden sticks, a pink doghouse, a table and a couple of chairs, a tiny white podium to sit on and a drum-kit. And then you notice them, the members of the family you’re going to spend your evening with, in pyjamas. Do Animals Cry is Stuart’s portrayal of that familiar and strange entity we call ‘family’. You get lots of little scenes and choreographies, dealing with everything a family can be or do.

There’s loving and caring, teasing and seducing. You see friends and lovers, important decisions are being announced, children are given some sound advice, there’s mourning and partying, the long lost son is welcomed back, the enfant terrible is being shut out, family snapshots are taken, and somewhere in between they all take the dog for a walk.

I’ve seen all of that, in Théâtre De La Ville, but at the same time I’ve felt many other things too. That’s because Meg Stuart is, to go back to the beginning, so gifted in offering us a sort of surreal summary of what we humans do. Sometimes just the beginning of a movement is enough to carry the meaning of everything that could follow. She’s good as well in slowly pulling you into her world, one where things don’t need to be explained, because you sense what they are all about. Do Animals Cry takes its time. Its slow pace adds to a dreamy atmosphere, that is enhanced by a mesmerizing, often hauntingly beautiful soundtrack by Hahn Rowe.

Do Animals Cry is funny and sad, recognisable and weird. There’s bits and pieces that remind you of her previous performances. The guys next to me had left, before I could ask them what they had made of it. But Do Animals Cry proves one thing: if you are thinking that Meg Stuart’s performances can only be twisted and distant, think again. This moved me in a way I’d forgotten somebody could move me in a theatre. So yes, they were right. With Meg Stuart one never knows what to expect.

Awkwardness rarely becomes so tangible as in the duet 'Maybe Forever' of Meg Stuart and Philippe Gehmacher.

Philipp Gehmacher and Meg Stuart met each other little more than ten years ago during a workshop. Stuart had already had her great breakthrough with Disfigure Study and No Longer Readymade. Gehmacher still had to position himself on the map with his 'Incubator-cycle'. Since then they both marked the field of dance in a very unique way.

At first sight they don't have a lot in common. The American choreographer is something of an iconoclast, while the young Austrian stands for a movement language sprung out of distilled despair. Yet they find each other in a fascination for dislocation and disruption. That shared partiality shows up in Maybe Forever, the result of their meeting on stage.

Stuart and Gehmacher share the stage with singer and guitar-player Niko Hafkenscheid. He serves as the contemporary minstrel who expresses the tragedy of life in lyrical poetry. Picking his guitar he timidly tells of loss and longing. His songs belong to the depths of the night, when loneliness is the only companion left at the bar.

In between the songs Gehmacher and Stuart play with expectations that are never fulfilled. They slip away from each other's wavering embraces. Caresses die away before they even touch the skin. Sometimes they do take shelter in each other's arms, but the intimacy and warmth that shat should be found there, cool down before it even got the chance to heat up. They chase shadows: their own's and the other's.

Maybe Forever resembles at first sight a montage of flasbacks of a love long lost, as is used in films. They often serve as turning point in the story, or as a way to dwell on what has happened.
The pair on stage grasp similar moments of melancholy, live them or comment on them. At the same time, their musings stay aloof. All that stirs underneath remains indefinable. The same goes for the future. The loss still has to find its own place, but where exactly? In the meantime the awareness of finity grows.

All of that results in a feeling of discomfort that seeps in the whole of the performance. It's a feeling that unobtrusively creeps upon the audience, and finally conquers it, an effect both of them regularly aim at in their own creations.

Artistically, Gehmacher andStuart have put their doors wide open for each other, without losing track of their own qualities. This creation joins Stuarts spectrum of atmospheres and Gehmachers emotional rigidity in a way that enables them both to experience a new side of themselves, and to show that.

Maybe forever, Meg Stuart’s and Philipp Gehmacher’s first joint-venture, is a contemporary interpretation of motionless dance that comes alive thanks to the alchemy between two kindred minds. Its themes of alienation and melancholy are ultimately woven into a harmony that touches the heart with its sheer power and vulnerability. Such is the impact that it reaffirms one’s faith in the authentic presence within a theatrical framework.

In Maybe forever, Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher represent, as choreographer and dancer, the sensitivities of two generations. Meg Stuart’s 1991 debut - Disfigure Study - was a registration, an illustration, a rendering of and a comment on alienation, speed and fragmentation in an age on the run. One year later, she made a solo piece about a man reaching for his memories, in which the absence of motion articulated a new vocabulary of ‘movement’. But standing still expressed an explicit political message rather than a new perspective in her choreographic work: the man on stage was the French critic and organizer Jean-Marc Adolphe who had organized a project in Paris around immobility as a reaction against the wars in the Gulf and Bosnia.

If standing still for Meg Stuart is a political, rational or conceptual statement imposed on or added to the body, Philipp Gehmacher’s is a different kind of motionlessness. Over and over again, he comes to a halt in order to fully grasp the reality of the body in the here and now of its environment. The resulting vulnerability is devoid of social and theatrical conventions. Again and again, he makes the connection with his body and his immediate surroundings in order to create the possibility for transformation and renewal. Taking this as the nexus of the performance, Maybe Forever can be read as an expression of the urgent need for purely individual survival strategies - and also of personal responsibility - within what Peter Sloterdijk describes as the hyperkinetic project of modernity, whereby continuous and ever faster movement is both the motor and cost of admission. Whoever is caught up in this mechanism has no time for what is in front of them. Such an insurmountable present must be compensated for: wistfulness and melancholia about the past are never far away. And as chance would have it, these two states of mind form the framework of Maybe Forever.

Kinship and difference

In the impact and nature of their respective dance languages Philipp Gehmacher (Salzburg, 1975) and Meg Stuart (New Orleans,1965) just had to be kindred spirits. Far away from home both of them straightaway left their mark on the dance scene with a similarly describable idiom.
They are connected in their clear and stubborn view on the alienated body and the crippled communication that is both its cause and effect. At the same time they diverge in the way they transform their views into performance art. The differences in their approach were beautifully illustrated in the performances that each of them presented earlier this year in Kaaitheater.

In February I saw Gehmacher’s As if there’s no tomorrow, a compelling performance with three dancers in a - apart from a battery of loudspeakers - naked space in which the dysfunction of body, time, space and communication is explored.

With its vocabulary of blindly looking, reaching, fumbling, an aborted touch, hesitating, jerking, staggering, falling down on hands and knees, As if there’s no tomorrow develops a repetitive cycle of deceleration and acceleration on revolutions in time and space. Afterwards my memory labels it as ‘classic’. Classic as in timeless, universal. Gehmacher does not want to explain: ‘As a general rule I won’t have anything in my pieces that explains what I do - it should always just be it, in the moment. ... In time and space that is always something that I do - disrupting time, disrupting space - that is my way to arrive at signification and that is the formalism of my work.’ He thus points out the extended present that I identify in Maybe Forever.

Compared to Gehmacher’s cyclical, inward minimalism, Meg Stuart’s Blessed, which premiered in April, was rather reminiscent of an (excellent) baroque epic. In the cardboard set of visual artist Doris Dziersk, an ecological apocalypse evolves in five tableaux centered around a man, the dancer Francisco Camacho, who is out of synch with himself and his surroundings. Even his numbness does not keep pace with the way the world collapses around him.

His movement vocabulary evolves from stiff to overly supple, to big uncontrollable spasms of a man in a state of shock. Meanwhile his world of cardboard art (shelter, palmtree and swan) has turned into mushy pulp by means of an incessant downpour from the stage’s sky.

In its clear and linear structure, Blessed delivers an almost political message that is perfectly interlaced with the movement material, the set design, the costumes and the lighting. The outside world is emphatically present in Meg Stuart’s work, in its environmental issues and its alienation theme, as well as in the person of the artists and musicians who work with her.

Forever, maybe

Two dance generations in phases of respectively ‘cyclical inside’ and ‘linear outside’ around and along a core of alienation. Where exactly would they meet? How would they manage to be more than their sum - and find the point where one and one equals three? As by now my curiosity is overexcited I watch Maybe Forever twice in a row.

On a basso continuo of charming natural sounds, gurgling water and twittering birds at a greyish daybreak, a duet between a man and a woman sets off. He drags himself over the stage floor toward her, like a man in the desert looking for a drop of water. As she lies down next to him and holds on to him, he aggressively nails her to the floor and keeps her neck imprisoned in the hollow between his torso and elbow. When a bit later they get up, he has a second go: He blindly reaches for her arm and embraces her with stretched forearms, holding his palms upwards. Then he moves away from her to kneel and put down his gesture on the floor, as in an offering. She clings to him again, he drags her along moving away from her. Every time they lose: they never meet.

This small cycle is the start of what at first sight could be described as a parable on desire, loss and melancholy, with two ex-lovers telling their story in a succession of dance duets and solos, soliloquies and songs. The protagonists are a man (Philipp Gehmacher), a woman (Meg Stuart) and a musician (Niko Hafkensheid), the latter being a hyper-cool solitary chorist who lightens up the atmosphere by cracking the occasional joke. Accompanied by his electric guitar he comments on what is going on with his unpretentious evergreens that stick to your mind for days to come. ‘Maybe forever’, he sings, ‘this day is taking me out/and I wonder if I’m now on my powerful side/this day comes true/when my wishes all slip out’. Here he introduces the chorus: time and desire, which I, as a spectator, will carry with me for the rest of the performance.

Every aspect of the performance seems like a building brick that illustrates the tragedy of the missed meeting and the impossible present. Time and again the present has to make way for a melancholic mourning project: the desire for what is not present here and now.

Time is translated into what has passed and what could have been: love, memories and wishes.
Next to the songs, the melancholy is interlaced in each of the attributes on stage. Against the backdrop is a projection screen as high as the ceiling with dark grey curtains on either side. One image remains projected on the rhythm of the performance, in changing gradations of colour and clarity: two overblown, fluffy dandelions. When we were kids, we called them ‘blowflowers’. If you were able to blow all fluffs in one go, you could make a wish, just like candles on a birthday cake. Behind the big curtains is the space where maybe wishes come true - later the musician announces a Reward waltz and the lovers can really dance together for a while as a reward for all their unfulfilled aspirations. On the left, in front of the projection screen, is a low grey construction, a kind of estrade with two broad steps that lead to a small platform. An altar for the sacrifice rituals of desire, or a tombstone for things passed. Time will tell.
Up front are a couple of microphones for making declarations and raking up old memories. Then there is the soundscape that adds yet another layer of time to the story: ‘Shall we do our wishes at the same time, so we don’t have to listen to each other?’ we hear the woman say.

Harmony

With Gehmacher’s first solo this interpretation is rearranged.
He enters and seems to hesitate. He makes a somewhat lanky step forwards and sits down on the floor with his legs in front of him and his arms alongside his body. He spreads his arms to the sides and upwards. His movements are not fluent. Every time the sequence is interrupted, he stops and comes back to start again from there. He reaches up, falls down on his knees and puts down what he
found up there in front of him here. In the meantime the woman displays herself on the steps of the tomb. He gets up, walks to the screen, stares at the image and raises his arms again. She walks up to him and imitates his movements. The audience is fascinated. I am touched to tears. How come?

Gehmacher sheds time and makes the present possible. He succeeds in involving me, his spectator, in his cryptically phrased it-moment. How does he do that? I notice two ‘techniques’. For one, there is his idiomatic repertoire of hesitating, jolting, standing still - just as many ways to give himself the time to again and again return to what is going on now. There is no need for any armour of display: there is only room for inwardness and vulnerable strength. And here the second purification of Gehmacher’s movement material shows: that which I will call (for want of a better name) his mental idiom. He shuffles with his toes pointing inward and his head slightly stooping and passes us, the highbrows in the audience, as if he were not of this world. Great spasms pass through his body, jerky movements he does not seem to be in control of. Every step forward is more like a falling forward. He gazes into nothingness. His is the vocabulary of a disabled mind, or rather, an otherwise abled mind which we associate with the kind of behaviour that won’t give in to social discipline and that has no clue of a self- conscious display of the ego.

His mode of progression is not rushed by wishes or expectations. He creates a nexus that escapes time and space. There is no other point of reference than the here and now of his body vibrating in space.
Harmony is the key to the impact of Gehmacher’s language. We may indeed not immediately associate his interrupted and jolting movements with harmony, nonetheless it is there and even to the degree of moving us. He uses standing still as a mechanism for unlocking in the way John Cage builds compositions on the basis of silence: for Cage every silence is music and isolated from the memory of similar moments. Time and again silence is the condition and genesis. A musician who is able to accept its creative power, Cage feels, is in connection with Nature’s fundamental heterogeneity. Cage may have found his inspiration in the ancient Daoist concept of wu wei, from his beloved oracle book, the I Ching. Daoism considers all phenomena as an organically connected whole in a cyclical and continuously changing process. In order to harmonize with the greater whole, wu wei (non-action or non-interference), or still wei wu (conscious non-action) is advised. Gehmacher applies the same procedure: every time again he interrupts the movement to accept what is present and every time again he establishes the individual connection with it.

Counterpoint

Time’s ‘now’ is in Gehmacher’s body. Straightaway from his first solo this forms the core of the performance. A texture of memories and melancholy around it serves as counterpoint. Meg Stuart’s share lies in the force and vision with which she accentuates this counterpoint: she displays her body while he is his gathering himself, she clings to him while he is dragging her along. She tries to imitate his movements and finds a language to express how scary ‘now’ is. Her text solo is a string of memories that she connects with the ever recurring onset ‘Do you remember...?’ ‘OK, ... One, two...’ she says in the microphone - and stops short after a deep and violent inhalation. ‘I’m not ready!’ She jumps away from the microphone and her body is one big rejecting spasm. She returns: ‘It’s all around, my bravery is all around’. A bit later it becomes clear what kind of bravery is in order here: ‘His eyes are wide, he’s going to explode, bravery is all around’. On the rhythm of the text she goes back into time: ‘Where did they go then,then,then,then...?’.

Gehmacher arrives and sits down on the tombstone, with his back to the audience. She sits down next to him and their backs already show their differences. Hers is manifesting itself, his is contemplating. Meg Stuart’s sinewy ‘brave’ body is the sum of another (dance) history than the soft, contemplative body of Philipp Gehmacher.

The power of the performance lies in its counterpoint. It maximizes the impact of how onto the history of broken and fragmented movements and bodies, of standing still in dance, something new is added here. The new open and generative ‘now’ is highlighted by everything that is ‘not-now’: recollection and desire - the evergreens, memories, the image of the wishing flower, words from the past on the soundscape, the tombstone / altar. At the same time it becomes clear that no past exists that is not at work anymore: the most remote and minute past seems to give shape to the new connections that turn the body’s ‘now’ into a continuously renewed present that resonates in a continuously renewed space. Gehmacher enters, opens up to what is present now, integrates, repositions and continues, to time
and again repeat the whole procedure. In this way every standstill is a memory as well, every given that has passed is taken along.

In the text solo that concludes the performance, this is more or less what he says. As he is standing in front of one microphone and then moves on to the next, I hear somebody in the audience clear his throat. You didn’t expect Gehmacher to be able to talk, but his rhythm is in perfect harmony with the music on the soundscape. Ever so slowly, in a shifted time, as if reading a letter while it is being written, he says:

‘This is the moment where
I have to accept the place ... I want you to know
that I love and cherish you. You gave me my beginning’.
place I’m in.
And with these words relief is indicated.

Meg Stuart crashes illusions in her 2 new performances "It's not funny" and "Blessed".

Ignorance is a blessing, because knowledge implies complexes. And complexes lead to shame.
You would think that the person who can shamelessy display his crushed selfesteem is truly blessed. He is. But not his audience. They get bothered by vicarious shame. That is the uneasy borderline on which Meg Stuart dwells in her 2 new productions for Damaged Goods.

(...)

The other production, BLESSED, does strike one dumb. This solo for Francisco Camacho also shows that ignorance is a blessing. It protects against the nightmare, otherwise called "reality". At first nothing is the matter. Camacho strolls as a real Robinson about his island. Everything happens incredibly slowly. Time does not exist in this paradise. Untill it starts to drip. So perhaps take shelter in the cabin and wait. But it only gets worse: dripping turns into pouring. His little cardboard house, the meticulously constructed illusion, starts to collapse under the deluge.

But he does not give up his cocoon that easily. Like a hippy, the kind that hugs trees, he wriggles out of the wreckage. A few things might slip through his fingers, but that is no reason to not continue dreaming with his eyes open. Palmtrees can still be hugged, as long as they are not completely smashed to smithereens.

What makes this solo so oppressive, is the transformation that takes places for your very eyes. From delightful delusion to sheer folly. The valium for the soul has worn off, and with the rain the consciousness seeps in that the bleak surroundings cannot be denied. We see a man who clings to his sunny worldview and refuses to see that he is up to his neck in mushy mud. Obviously it is somebody elses's fault that everything rains into pulp. With paint he sprays his reproaches on the wall, but nobody yells back. He remains hollering alone in his mock paradise. Nevertheless little by little escape routes to cling to his bliss are being suggested. New clothes, new shapes, new glasses alternate quicker and quicker. A lockjaw fixes his smile into a gruesome grimace. All of those are disposable strategies that, just like his house, tree and swan, cannot stand up to the external pressure. Fortunately after rain follows sunshine. In the end he can once again stroll on, gazing at infinity, thinking of nothing. Things don't look that bright for the audience though. It is impossible to return to the time of illusions. Since they have been harshly smashed.

A distressing conclusion of a penetrating performance, that sends one dazed back into the streets.

As opposed to Humphrey and Paxton, Stuart (1965) speaks about the process of exposure, that has other presentational characteristics. In degrees of giving and showing, stillness and microscopy are conditions for personal exposure; Stuart puts the personal and bodily in public space; she sees the body as a physical narrative, pointing to intense physical experiences as well as social and cultural readings of the body.

Stillness and microscopy, conditions for personal exposure

Meg Stuart is well known for working with near still bodies, minimal movements, the exposing of personal and bodily experience is important for her. The wilful act of exposure expresses an invitation to share the personal and intimate with the public.

In an interview for the BRT Meg Stuart explains her working methods for making Disfigure Study, and No one is watching. By endless repetition she arrives at forms. The repetition of a particular movement informs her not just of the physical movement possibilities but also the sensations that accompany them. Limitation is used in her approach to come to discoveries and intensities of experiences. ‘The whole process was to do with elimination and coming to terms with the fact that there really could not be this “dancey” part. … it is really not material that is important, it is strength of idea’ (Stuart 1993, 10). It has enabled her ‘to dance with unmoved bodies’ (Husemann, 33). The bodies come to near stillness of which she says ‘It’s not frozen, it’s liminal. Liminal is when something is becoming but not quite becoming’ (in Vandenbussche in Husemann, 34). It is in this respect that Lepecki speaks about the microscopic, how Stuart and other choreographers are making the spectator look at minute movement in the body, vibrations rather than movement (Lepecki 2000).

Her interest in stillness is expressed in the way she speaks about time. She speaks about ‘condensing time’ (Husemann, 60), that time can be stretched or shortened. In another context she speaks about the creation of ‘over-time’, by slowing down the actions of the dancers, the spectator is given more time to see. ‘Experience of over-time. You see beyond the first and then you are forced to see more in multiplicity, more than form, image, more than one relationship. You start to have association beyond’ (in Vandenbussche in Husemann, 61). For No one is watching one of the interests was ‘the moment in between’, when nothing happens, private, unnoticed moments. She is not looking for linear narratives, but rather associative readings, and time that allows for seeing different possible readings of an event

For the performer this approach has consequences for the performance attitude. She is looking for a combination of openness, honesty and awareness and clarity of performance: ‘When the work is good it is meticulously clear - attention - quick shifts, there is honesty, awareness. You are being aware that you are being watched ( ) I don’t think you can be casual - intensity and passion has to come out’ (Stuart 1993, 7). She expresses a wish to break down the barrier between public and performer, and the expectations of showing off in front of an audience (Stuart 1993, 7). One way of doing that is by looking at the qualities of performing itself, the act of exposing oneself. ’In the material I am working on now … I am just wearing underwear … I am exposed. I want to go that far, into the embarrassment and the vulnerability and yet just be clear. I know the audience is present watching me. I ask myself what it is that I expect of myself and what it is that the audience expects of me….. I think it is about the exposure of personal experience’ (Stuart 1993,11). Stuart looks for tension between the dancer as object of attention and performing subject, in command of the performance. The sense of detail is enhanced by the use of extended time, slow actions that allow the public full view into the individual performer’s actions. It also increases the tension between the body’s visual aspects, of the posing and the intimacy of the live performance in front of the audience. The dancer is in command but at the same time allows us a more than usual view of his or her body in positions that are not everyday and often uncomfortable (see also Laermans 1995, and Lepecki 2000, 362).

The personal and bodily in public space

As in Paxton’s work, there is no more projected body, but material that is generated by the dancer himself. The body of the dancer can be seen as a ‘ready made’ object for a choreographer to work with, especially when personal traits of the dancers become material for the creation of a work. ‘For me, it is interesting how to work with particular people, how to bring out their personal movement, and to connect them to a part of me, to what is on my mind’ (Stuart 1993, 10). ‘Bodily characteristics tell about our lives’ (Alibi). Indeed, one of her pieces does honour Duchamp, adding a next step at the same time, it is entitled No more ready made. There is an explicit continuity between the outside world and the world of art. Her works are often set in locations, or presented as installations. There are no more separations between the personal and the public, the public is made up of the personal, and the personal is situated in the public realm.

Stuart’s motivations for seeking personal exposure in public space also have to do with the neglect of the bodily in contemporary society: ‘I have the impression we are becoming increasingly alienated from our body. At a time when virtual reality is increasing, the sensory basis of life is crumbling. Seen in that light, sweating bodies or two people crawling around on the ground touching each other is more than enough to shock the public. Simply because it’s so physical and - more than in film - tangibly present. Dance, by its very nature, is an exposure of the body, and this is why theatre, as one of the few places where people collectively experience a physical event, can only become more extreme’ (van Imschoot 1996, 24).

She allows space for a multiplicity of readings of her work, and does not aim to control or project a particular reading. But the generating of the images she creates stems from particular physical exercises. This can lead to misunderstandings about how the work should be read, as with Disfigure Study: She said in an interview that the piece was about AIDS, but in reality she never tried to make a piece about AIDS. The dance crossed over into that area, she says, from a physical problem of isolating body parts. It became a narrative that dealt with issues that were around in contemporary society (Stuart 1993, 6). To her critics, this created some confusion in the reception of this work.

Physical narrative

Stuart can be seen as of a later generation, who appreciates and has been influenced by Paxton’s generation, but also moves on to new questions. ‘I also greatly admired and admire Steve Paxton. But I began to wonder what would happen if you didn’t rush over to catch your partner when he fell. What if the flow of the movements were broken, if the contact became problematic?’ (van Imschoot 1996, 26). Where the rebellion of the Judson Church generation against expressionist dance led to the eradication of narrative from dance making, Stuart readdresses narrative possibilities, at the same time departing from the radical movement research that was developed in the previous era.

The body has become a central concern in her work. ‘So I always start from the body. But I put it into situations that imply a problem, that squeeze and constrict, that I investigate for their potential as physical narrative’ (van Imschoot 1996, 26). She calls this ‘asking questions in action’, how, by putting the body in impossible situations, the narrative possibility makes the work stronger. She explains how in a solo she starts out with her own figure and the comments on it, and develops positions, as if she is ‘trying to rescue my body’ (Stuart 1993, 9). The way of working has to do with setting up situations that will generate physical narrative from the experience of moving. Like Paxton, Stuart too is looking for tasks to make the body tell, ‘it has to come from a movement, an image will hit me, stimulate as I am dancing’ (Stuart 1993, 5), and not illustrate, to get beyond self-consciousness. ‘There is always this task, this intention, this ‘have to’ and then the body moves…you just do. Somehow there is this self-consciousness that is removed from the performer in the ideal case’ (Stuart 1998, 291). She is looking for uncontrolled, or involuntary, rather than well-co-ordinated movement. ‘I am fascinated by involuntary movements and what I call “physical states” or “emotional states” in the body. For me it is related to the question what exactly can be described as dance’ (Stuart 1998). Indeed, maybe this is what leads her into making dance works that are criticised for being too static (Lepecki 2000). For Stuart the basis lies in the physical, the narrative is not something that she determines beforehand, it evolves out of the physical experience, the process of asking questions in action. Her approach can be described by combining Elisabeth Grosz’ concepts of “inside out”, where Stuart is looking for intense physical states, and “outside in”, by allowing the spectator to read all kinds of ways in which the body is inscribed by social and cultural contexts (Grosz 1997).

Stuart feels there is a neglect in contemporary society of attention to the body. She works with stillness, as a form of microscopy that creates the right conditions for personal exposure. She puts the personal and bodily in public space. The body is not an object but she looks at the body as a physical narrative, always loaded with meaning, that can be found in the act of wilfully exposing oneself to the public gaze.

Excerpt from the article: Presentational modes in dance: how the body speaks about the body
Ways of presenting the dancing body in the work of Steve Paxton and Meg Stuart

We live on a mountain
Right at the top
There’s a beautiful view
From the top of the mountain
Every morning I walk towards the edge
And throw little things off
Like:
Car-parts, bottles and cutlery
Or whatever I find lying around

It’s become a habit
A way
To start the day

I go through all this
Before you wake up
So I can feel happier
To be safe up here with you

It’s early in the morning
No-one is awake
I’m back at my cliff
Still throwing things off
I listen to the sounds they make
On their way down
I follow with my eyes ‘til they crash
Imagine what my body would sound like
Slamming against those rocks

The moment performance and dance enter the realm of the visual arts, art becomes invaded by disappearance. It can start to comment on memory, amnesia and historicity. Hence, by acknowledging its perennial nature, and the perennial nature of living, the visual arts as a whole must let themselves become “degenerated” (to use Fried’s expression) by performance’s essence - the one of being always already vanishing. Like Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits; like Joseph Beuys’ deteriorating objects covered with fat or fur, painted in blood; like the sad repetitive machines of Rebecca Horn; or like Iana Sterbac’s “Meat Dress” decaying in some museum.

So, the interesting question to ask is what lies behind this need for a certain kind of “degeneration” in the visual arts, a degeneration seen as properly theatrical ? I would suggest that this “staging” in the visual, this call for the performative in art, emerges precisely (and not as paradoxically as it may sound first), as a political need to underline the political implications of art’s vanishing nature. Arts should poke our lazy eyes, trained to be blind, it should gesture towards the absent in the portrayed, that which is left out, in between. Art should initiate a certain form of movement; it should be inhabited by movement and by its own death.

Since the first presentations of Disfigure Study (1991) in Europe, dance critics have been unanimous in associating the work of Meg Stuart with that of visual artists. Francis Bacon was the main reference for this work. In No Longer Readymade (1993) , the ironic references to Duchamp, and somehow to Rauchenberg’s found-objects were emphasized in an essay by Rudi Laermans. The work of Meg Stuart then moved on to a more close relationship with the world of the visual arts in 1994, with her first collaboration with a visual artist in 1994, with her first collaboration with a visual artist in the production Swallow My Yellow Smile for the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Still in 1994, she created a dance installation for the project This is the Show and the Show is Many Things, curated by Bart Debaere at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Gent, Belgium. In 1995, Meg Stuart continued this approach between the dance and the visual arts with No One is Watching with set design and objects by visual artist Lawrence Carroll.

In 1994 Meg Stuart named her company Damaged Goods. In which ways Stuart’s “damaged” comments on Fried’s “degenerated” art ?

Meg Stuart’s continuous studies in the approach of the dance to the condition of the visual arts constitute the prolongation of her choreographic of her choreographic concerns on two fundamental areas of post-modern art : the performative implications of a rhetoric of the pose and the political implications of an aesthetics of defacement. In both, Meg Stuart emphasizes the choreographic possibilities and the ethical consequences of tracing and of the inscription of history onto the body of choreography. In other words, of how choreography can approach the problem of memory as movement. This ongoing research is truly challenging and important in the scenario of contemporary performing and visual arts. Its implications on a politics of the gaze are visible by the inscription of time in Meg Stuart’s carefully built and precise movements, and by her invocation of the audience in her work. Meg Stuart’s choreographies continuously poke our lazy eyes, trained to a careful, hygienic blindness.

I believe these still non-existent spaces for being that dance performs, are those explored and inhabited by Meg Stuart’s choreographic works, where, as she says, “Life happens in between”. The space-in-between is but that cognitive gap inhabited by gestures that can exist only as a trace; it is the space of difference, and of memory. It is in this sense that Meg Stuart’s work is unique - it is not just another well crafted form of dance-theater, but rather a most radical form of choreographing. One critic wrote on the work of Meg Stuart that her “choreographic skill lies in the love for detail and in the victory over time”. This hyperbolic inscription of time in the choreographic material and this extreme attention that Meg Stuart pays to the most minimal gesture, attitude, and posture is but her claim of the highly choreographic essence of the rhetoric of the pose. Thus Meg Stuart creates her time. A time as radical as touching what will no longer be there.

The unanimous critical remark that the work of Meg Stuart is highly related and informed by the visual arts can only happen in a historical context where the visual arts themselves have been already “damaged” by the power of the theatrical. If Meg Stuart’s work approaches the work of the visual artist it is because art had already entered the realm of performance, of historicity, of time passing, of the power of the ephemeral. To the question is her work still dance then ? My answer is - it is only dance, and cannot be anything else.

New Moves Across Europe is the full title of Nikki Milican’s programme at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. Yet even though Meg Stuart’s two companion dancers in her Disfigure Study are Portuguese, and the piece has largely been funded with European money, there can be no doubt that the thrust of Stuart’s choreography springs from her native New York.

We see it in the easy flow of the body from loose-limbed fluidity to sharp, tight little movements; it manifests itself in de layering of motion, the highs and lows of stretched extensions and squat ground work; and we hear it in the urban jungle beat of Hahn Rowe’s eclectic, babbling score.

Watching Disfigure Study is something akin to voyeurism: everything is pared down and there are no superfluous flourishes of movement. This naked physical vocabulary is used through a series of encounters, either with pars of the dancer’s own body, or with each other.

So we have an opening vignette where a man’s bared legs, picked out in light, hang ominously above the prostate figure of a woman. They move seductively, the woman stirs and begin to caress these strangely severed limbs. The movements grow frantic until the final image of strangled capitulation.

At other points a dancer’s own limbs seem to take on their own lives, probing and attacking their owner’s bodies. In one mesmerising sequence Stuart supports the body of Carlota Lagido by merely holding and manipulating her head. The extraordinary feeling of trust this image conjures is continually jeopardised by the ferocity of the movements, yet it is never broken.

Later, with Francisco Camacho, Stuart engages in a predatory duet; a chase sequence in which the pair slither and slide across the surface of the floor like hungry crocodiles. The sheer quality of movement, from all three participants, is impressive and Stuart’s inventiveness is, at times, breath taking. A dark and often disturbing work Disfigure Study is, nevertheless, the highlight of New Moves so far.

Meg Stuart, who graduated from NYU’s Tisch school of Arts in 1986 and has been dancing with Randy Warshaw since then, was spurred to her first full-evening piece, Disfigure Study, by a commission from the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven, Belgium. At the Kitchen, violinist/composer Hahn Rowe’s harsh, dark-grained music, performed live, gave unrelieved weight, perhaps too much, and intense, tightly focused lighting by Warshaw isolated the dancers in the gloomy void.

Some of the piece’s five section are narrow but elaborate studies like the opener, in which Francisco Camacho dangles his feet: letting his legs twist, his feet caress each other. (Above the knees his body vanishes in blackness.) Lying below him, Carlota Lagido strains to lift her head and chest, presses her cheek against his feet, rubs against his ankles, like the devotee of a moldering saint. In the closing section, the same two (both from Portugal) stand close to each other, facing in opposite directions, and he rudely runs his hand over her flesh – face, breasts, belly, legs – probing her with ignorant haste. Stiff and submissive, stifling her responses, she hardly moves. Rarely she gets so distressed that she plucks his hand of her. Yet she’ll replace it as if any touch were better than none, as if to instruct him that human contact can be something other than this blind tactile greed.

In the in-place solo that opens that section, Lagido gobbles her hand, lets her crab fingers creep along her body and snag under her arm. There’s a nearly fanatical, medieval sense that the body is a loathsome burden, a curse, something to be cast off. In the fraught, erratic adjustments, the urgent pulls to destroy the body’s symmetry, is portrayed as a deep, terrible, shaming awkwardness.

Stuart’s exhaustive, self-protective solo also evidences this physical unhappiness in the persistent twisting of the body, the way parts of it get stuck on other parts, the way more vigorous movement erupts spasmodically. Her head snuggles against her shoulder comfortlessly, the shoulder is jammed to the chin, she pushes again the back of her rib cage, all as if trying to find a bodily configuration that provides some ease. She suddenly drops, drops, drops to one side as if her bones were jelly. Or slips out of positions she’s momentarily locked into. Or flails and slashes her arms with floppy force. There are no shortcuts: Stuart takes us through every step of her painful, mechanical process.

A duet with Lagido – in which Stuart holds, drops, catches, twists Lagido’s head, slings her around, hauls her close, drags her like a rag doll – is hard-nosed in the same punishing way. Lagido gives herself over beautifully to this brand of manhandling, letting her body follow unquestioningly Stuart’s wrenchings. Yet to trust such obsessed manipulation, to allow oneself to be so totally a toy, is a kind of idiocy.

The urgent fourth section is the dramatic focus of the evening, the most layered in complexity, and satisfyingly dynamic. Camacho, compact and eloquent, methodically holds himself, snakes his arms close to his body, falls with gusto, swiftly collapses. In the back, in very dim light, Stuart and Lagido roll, push up, roll, un unison. Then, while Camacho lies pretzeled on the floor, Stuart struggles toward him, doubling, folding, heaving her body across the floor, deprived of the proper use of her limbs. Whenever she gets next to him, he rolls away, flees faster and faster, and she follows, scrambling after, sliding, throwing herself, floundering like a fish on the deck of a boat, frantic for air. There’s a kind of acid joy in her determination.

But it’s failure that absorbs Stuart- the body’s stubborn, fumbling thickness, its sticky desires and cruel inefficacies. And everyone is shown as damaged goods.

Highlight was the macabre dance of a couple with motorcycle helmets and heavy boots. The man with stilts strides with the confidence of a great warrior or writhes helplessly on the ground. Sometimes the small woman in the tulle skirt pulls on the wooden legs, sometimes she fuses with him into one gigantic creature. In changing light and strange sounds the two torment each other or unite as a loving couple. They are incredible, rarely seen, ever new images that flash and fade away. Choreographer Meg Stuart ("Actually I really hate circus") has created a framework for this young, performing duo, which explores artistic and physical limits.